Survival of the Gorgeous (A Tragic Occident)
Image by MoonToad NL
"The interior of the
room is not like anything to be seen in the east
of Europe. It is half rich Bulgarian, half cheap
Viennese. The counterpane and hangings of the bed,
the window curtains, the little carpet, and all
the ornamental textile fabrics in the room are
oriental and gorgeous: the paper on the walls is
occidental and paltry. Above the head of the bed,
which stands against a little wall cutting off the
right hand corner of the room diagonally, is a
painted wooden shrine, blue and gold, with an
ivory image of Christ, and a light hanging before
it in a pierced metal ball suspended by three
chains. On the left, further forward, is an
ottoman. The washstand, against the wall on the
left, consists of an enamelled iron basin with a
pail beneath it in a painted metal frame, and a
single towel on the rail at the side. A chair near
it is Austrian bent wood, with cane seat. The
dressing table, between the bed and the window, is
an ordinary pine table, covered with a cloth of
many colors, but with an expensive toilet mirror
on it. The door is on the right; and there is a
chest of drawers between the door and the bed."
'Arms and a Man' by George Bernard Shaw
Stanley Steamer Car
Image by HuTDoG83
J.Hutchins Photography
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Setting
-Saratoga Springs, NY - Steam Car lawn show at the Saratoga Automobile Museum
Shot
-Single Exposure JPG - Nikon D40
Lightroom
-Converted to sephia tone
Photoshop
-Added omni lighting to frontmost tire
-Created a new layer and put a textured layer and set the opacity low on that layer to give the image an "antique photo" look
Early history
1908 Stanley K RaceaboutTwins Francis E. Stanley (1849-1918) and Freelan O. Stanley (1849-1940) founded the company after selling their photographic dry plate business to Eastman Kodak. They produced their first car in 1897. During 1898 and 1899, they produced and sold over 200 cars, more than any other U.S. maker.[2] They later sold the rights to this early design to Locomobile, and in 1902 they formed the Stanley Motor Carriage Company.
Specifications and design
Early Stanley cars had light wooden bodies mounted on tubular steel frames by means of full-elliptic springs. Steam was generated in a vertical fire-tube boiler, mounted beneath the seat, with a vaporizing gasoline (later, kerosene) burner underneath. The boiler was reinforced by winding several layers of piano wire around it, which gave it a strong, yet relatively light-weight, shell. In early models, the vertical fire-tubes were made of copper, and were expanded into holes in the upper and lower crown sheets. In later models, the installation of a condenser caused oil-fouling of the expansion joints, and welded steel fire-tubes were used instead. The boilers were safer than one might expect – they were fitted with safety valves, and even if these failed, a dangerous overpressure would rupture one of the many joints long before the boiler shell was in danger of bursting, and the resulting leak would relieve the boiler pressure and douse the burner with little risk to the occupants of the car. There has never been a documented case of a Stanley boiler exploding in use.[1][2]
The engine had two double-acting cylinders side-by-side, equipped with slide-valves, and was of the simple-expansion type. Drive was transmitted directly from the engine crankshaft to a rear-mounted differential by means of a chain. Locomobiles were often modified by their owners, who added third-party accessories, e.g., improved lubricators, condensers, and devices which mitigated the laborious starting procedure, and so forth.
Later, the Stanley brothers, to overcome patent difficulties with the design they had sold to Locomobile, developed a new automobile model with twin cylinder engines geared directly to the back axle. Later models had aluminium coachwork, but retained many antiquated features, for example the unsprung tubular steel frame.
When they later shifted the steam boiler to the front of the vehicle, the resulting feature was called by owners the "coffin nose." In order to improve range, condensers were used, beginning in 1915. A Stanley Steamer set the world record for the fastest mile in an automobile (28.2 seconds) in 1906. This record was not broken by any automobile until 1911, although Glen Curtiss beat the record in 1907 with a V-8 powered motorcycle at 136 mph (218 km/h). Production rose to 500 cars in 1917.
Obsolescence
During the mid to late 1910s, the fuel efficiency and power delivery of internal combustion engines improved dramatically and the usage of an electric starter rather than a crank, which was notorious for injury to its operators, led to the rise of the gas-powered automobile (which eventually was much cheaper). The Stanley company produced a series of advertising campaigns trying to woo the car-buying public away from the "internal explosion engine," to little effect. An advertising slogan for these campaigns was, "Power - Correctly Generated, Correctly Controlled, Correctly Applied to the Rear Axle." These campaigns are early examples of a fear, uncertainty and doubt type advertising campaign, as their purpose was not so much to convince the audience of the benefits of the Stanley Steamer car as to plant the notion an internal combustion automobile could explode.
Sale and closure
In 1917, the brothers sold their interests to Prescott Warren. The company then endured a period of decline and technological stagnation. As the production specifications show,[3] no models with a power output higher than 20 hp were produced after 1918. Far better cars were available at much lower cost – for example, a 1924 Stanley 740D sedan cost 50, compared to under 0 for a Ford Model T. Widespread use of electric starters in internal combustion cars eroded the greatest remaining technological advantages of the steam car.
Efficiencies of scale, a lack of effective advertising and general public desire for higher speeds and less fussy starting than were possible with the Stanley technology were the primary causes of the company's demise and the factory closed for good in 1924.
Courtesy of Wikipedia.
The 2004 Utica Tornado Story - Part 3 of 3
Image by guano
(photo: Rustie views new construction for a memorial at the site of the Milestone Tap)
Utica Tornado of April 20, 2004
Story by Julia Keller
First printed December 5, 6, and7 in the Chicago Tribune.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part 3:
After the storm's fury
Left in tatters by a tornado, a small town remembers, rebuilds and begins to recover
By Julia Keller
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 7, 2004
They picked at the pile, inch by inch, stone by stone, just in case. They thought they'd gotten to everyone who was alive, but you had to be sure. You had to. Buckets of debris were passed from hand to hand along chains of firefighters. It began to rain, but nobody noticed.
Earlier that evening--at 6:09 p.m. April 20--a tornado had barreled through the town of Utica in north-central Illinois and, with a tornado's savage whim, had shunned a building here but shredded one over there. Hitting and missing and hitting.
Milestone. That was where the firefighters now were gathered, hundreds of firefighters from 52 units throughout the state. The 117-year-old tavern near the corner of Church and Mill Streets had taken a direct hit and collapsed into a ponderous heap of wood, stone and concrete, trapping 17 people who had sought shelter within its thick walls.
Nine had been rescued earlier that night: Jim Ventrice, Rich Little, Jarad Stillwell, and Mike and Debbie Miller and their children Ashley, Jennifer, Gregg and Chris.
The eight others still down there, firefighters believed, were dead. But they had to be sure.
So they kept working, systematically removing buckets full of rubble, pushing back thoughts of anything except the task at hand: dig, fill the bucket, pass the bucket, dig.
The whole place was lighted like a movie set. The lights cast an eerie glow on the firefighters in their heavy gear and their hardhats, their steel-toed boots and leather gloves. The lights splashed up on their solemn faces, which looked steep and angular in the artificial glare. All of that illumination made it seem as if a strange new sun had been unearthed, a mixed-up one that didn't know night from day.
At about 1:30 a.m., when the listening devices that were dropped down into crevices continued to fetch only silence, they knew the rescue part of their job was over. Now it was a different mission: recovering the bodies.
Buck Bierbom's skid loader was waved forward to handle the larger chunks of debris, but they had to be careful, so careful. When firefighters edged close to a body, the heavy equipment backed off and the painstaking labor by hand recommenced, the tender, awful job of verifying what they already knew.
Bierbom was a local boy, Utica-born and Utica-raised, a slender, wiry man with a creased, weathered, beard-fringed face and the kindest eyes you'd ever hope to see. He and his brothers, Mark and Doug, had run their own construction company for 12 years. Utica Police Chief Joseph Bernardoni had called him at 6:30 p.m., 21 minutes after the tornado leveled Milestone, and asked him to get there with his skid loader and mini-excavator just as quick as he could.
So tonight Bierbom was unearthing the bodies of people he'd known all his life. People he'd grown up with. People he'd waved to on the street maybe twice, maybe three times a day for a whole bunch of years.
Shortly before dawn, when all the bodies had been located, a chain saw cut away sections of Milestone's floor. Bierbom's big machine removed the sections. Then Jody Bernard, the somber, petite LaSalle County coroner, or one of her three deputy coroners, would climb down, examine the body and pronounce the death.
Each body was placed in a blue bag, then the blue bag was lifted out of the hole.
At 6:59 a.m., they lifted out Jay Vezain.
At 7:04 a.m., Carol Schultheis.
At 11:12 a.m., Mike Miller Jr.
At 11:15 a.m., Larry Ventrice.
At 11:17 a.m., Beverly Wood.
At 11:22 a.m., Marian Ventrice.
At 11:25 a.m., Wayne Ball.
At 11:28 a.m., Helen Studebaker Mahnke.
All but Vezain and Schultheis died of traumatic asphyxiation, which means they were crushed to death, probably in the first instant of the collapse, when the walls and floors began to pancake down into the basement. Vezain and Schultheis, who never made it into the basement, died of blunt force trauma.
But those official-sounding causes of death, announced by Bernard at the coroner's inquest May 27 at the LaSalle County Courthouse, hardly hint at what actually happens to human bodies when crushed by a two-story building: the brutality, the blunt and unimaginable violence of hundreds of tons of stone and wood and concrete collapsing upon fragile frames and soft flesh. There were shattered bones and severed arteries and fractured skulls and lacerated organs and one transection of the brain stem--decapitation.
The ones who survived did so because they chanced to be standing in just the right places. The walk-in cooler and the two freezers blocked a portion of the plummeting debris, creating instant, lifesaving lean-tos.
There had been, survivors said, simply no time. No time for final thoughts or last-minute regrets, for so much as a cry of pain or yelp of warning. There was only time, if one is inclined to think that way, for the freeing of eight souls to continue their journeys elsewhere.
- - - - -
They lived or they died. Among the living, the most serious injuries were the broken ankles suffered by Mike Miller and daughter Ashley, but no one was paralyzed or maimed, which meant there was no middle ground for the people in Milestone. It was life or death.
Whether you ended up on one side of that line or the other depended on whether you went down those basement stairs and what you did when you got there.
Whether you turned left or right. Whether you paused or didn't pause. Whether, when everybody was hustling down the stairs, you waited to let an older person pass or a kid go ahead of you, or whether you didn't wait, or whether you moved to the center of the basement or stayed against the sides. Left, right, forward, backward, life, death.
Schultheis' body was found beneath the video poker machine. Vezain had used his cell phone to call his sisters, making sure they were safe in the storm, and in the last call--suddenly cut off--he talked about trying to close the door, so maybe that's what he was doing, which would have been characteristic of the amiable, thoughtful Vezain, and then there was no more time, time itself was extinguished, and eight histories ended abruptly in a sandstone tavern at dusk.
The funerals began two days later, when Vezain was remembered at a service in LaSalle, and continued for a week after the tornado, in locations that widened out from Utica in concentric rings: Wood, Ball and Schultheis, also in LaSalle; Mahnke in West Brooklyn; Miller in Rock Falls; the Ventrices in Chicago.
They started on a hill about a half-mile northeast of Utica, where the tornado had worn itself out, and worked their way back, back to where it began, some 15 1/2 miles southwest of that hill.
It was approximately 10 a.m. on April 21, and Albert Pietrycha, Mark Ratzer and Jim Allsopp, meteorologists assigned to the National Weather Service's Chicago forecast office in Romeoville, were doing what they always do after a major storm: surveying the damage, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They'd map it on the ground first and then, the next day, by air.
Armed with laptops and GPS tracking software, the men in the Ford Explorer crossed country roads and state highways, cut through farm fields and spongy riverbank, using thrashed trees and flattened vegetation and ripped-off roofs to track the tornado's path. Out in the open ground they found its vivid footprint in the black mud, a herringbone pattern that testified to the violent, switchback winds.
Recording the damage in its wake is how meteorologists rank a tornado's severity. The F scale, named for University of Chicago meteorologist Ted Fujita, is based on the havoc wrought by tornadic winds--not on an actual measurement of those winds. The Utica tornado was deemed an F3, meaning that, based on the destruction the meteorologists observed, it probably had packed winds of between 158 and 206 m.p.h.
Despite all that is known, however, despite all the charts and statistics and technology, tornado forecasting still has a long way to go. Since the 1950s, which saw the first major advance in atmospheric science, little has changed. Tornado forecasting still is filled with ambiguity and uncertainty, with the locked-up secrets of nature's worst tantrums.
It's a mystery why some thunderstorms turn into the supercell variety, whose organized rotating updrafts explode into tornadoes. The questions keep scientists such as Pietrycha, who's worked at the weather service for two years, relentlessly searching a tornado's dark heart.
And there is a point, Pietrycha knows, where the scientific facts abruptly stop, a stark cliff-edge where something else takes over, some inscrutable plan or perhaps just cruel caprice. Destiny--or dumb luck. Who can say which?
That was why, as Pietrycha and his colleagues followed the tornado's crooked trail that morning, they were all struck by a thought they couldn't seem to get out of their heads:
If the 200-yard-wide funnel had moved just a bit to either side during its furious charge, leaning a half-mile left or right, it would have missed Utica altogether. It would have churned up only farmland, and Milestone still would be standing.
And the regulars, people such as Jay Vezain and Carol Schultheis, would have had quite a story to tell, the story about the tornado that nearly hit Utica. Talk about your close calls.
Why the tornado dived straight at Milestone, why it demolished some houses and ignored others, why it turned when it did and didn't turn when it didn't--those were questions the meteorologists couldn't answer.
And neither, come to think of it, could anybody else.
- - - - -
Mike Miller and his family had been trapped in the Milestone rubble for almost five hours. They were rescued, but sometimes you can be rescued and still be trapped.
Two months after the tornado, Miller sat on the postage-stamp of a front porch of his house in Utica and smoked Marlboros, one after another, through the long summer afternoons. He looked out at the green field across the street. Beyond the field and the tangled mass of trees was the Illinois River. Even if you couldn't see the river you knew it was there; the river's scent rode the breeze, just the faintest tang of moisture and sweet coolness and the tantalizing hint of elsewhere.
His ankle was on the mend. He'd spent a week in the hospital and two weeks in a rehabilitation center. Now he was home, in the small blue rented house on Washington Street.
Miller's skinny legs were propped up on the porch rail. The cast and bulky protective boot on his left foot was the only suggestion of heaviness about him. He was as thin as a matchstick, which tended to make his thick nest of hair--not quite gray but getting there--look even wilder. He had a bountiful mustache and flyaway eyebrows and round spectacles. There was a quietness about Mike Miller, a kind of baffled resignation.
The Miller family had to find someplace else to live. The landlord had evicted them in May--too many complaints about the kids from neighbors, they were told. Granted, Mike and Debbie hadn't been around the house a lot to keep an eye on things; he was an engineer with Illinois Central Railroad, she was a cook at Milestone.
Now both were home all the time, because Mike was on disability leave and there was no more Milestone. But it was too late. Now the Millers wanted to be rid of Utica just as much as Utica seemed to want to be rid of them.
They hoped to find a place in nearby LaSalle, so they could stay in the same area as their three oldest children, Kassi, 24, Brandon, 23, and Michelle, 19, who hadn't been with them in Milestone.
Their next-oldest child, 18-year-old Mike Jr., had died when the tavern collapsed.
It was bewildering sometimes, Mike thought, all that had happened to his family that night. "The Good Lord put us through four-and-a-half hours of hell," was how he phrased it, thinking back on the long rescue and the pain.
And there were times when he wondered, as he sat on the porch with his crutches stacked beside him, if they'd ever really gotten out of that place, ever really broken the surface. There were times when he felt as if things were piled on top of him still, things that made it tough to move forward.
Tear it down. That's what they told him.
And Lisle Elsbury said, Nope.
But you could see their point. Duffy's Tavern had long ragged holes on both sides of its second floor, the bricks ripped out as savagely as if someone had been digging for treasure hidden behind them. When the tornado hit, it tore off sections of the grain bins of Utica Elevator just across the canal, turning them into missiles. Two of those sections sliced into Duffy's.
A week after the storm, Elsbury was standing in the middle of Mill Street, peering intently at the building in which he'd stuffed his hopes and his cash. Contractors hired to help him repair it were snapping together the scaffolding to reach the second floor. Elsbury wore sunglasses, a hardhat, black jeans and a bright green T-shirt with "Duffy's Tavern" in yellow letters.
Built in 1892, easily Utica's most distinctive-looking structure, Duffy's sported a tower that flared out over the corner of Mill and Canal Streets with a Disneyesque flourish. That was why Elsbury and his wife, Pat, had bought it the year before. They loved the look of the place.
What it looked like now was a lost cause.
Elsbury had worked in construction in Lyons before buying Duffy's, so he knew the repairs would cost at least 0,000, only part of which would be reimbursed by insurance; already, he was deep in arguments with the agent.
And there was something else.
When you looked at Duffy's, you couldn't help but think about Milestone. They had been a block away from each other. Elsbury and Larry Ventrice, Milestone's brusque manager, had rhyming lives: Both had done other things before deciding, in their middle years, to run a bar in Utica. Both had wives who kept their jobs and lived in other cities so the family could have health insurance.
Marian Ventrice had quit her job just two months before, to join her husband at Milestone.
Pat Elsbury, who worked as a secretary for an oil-recycling company in La Grange, had been contemplating the same kind of bold stroke: Just do it. Forget what everybody says is the smart move. Follow your heart. Lisle was remodeling the second floor, turning it into an apartment--just like Larry and Marian had done at Milestone--and they'd be living and working together. Just like Milestone.
And then came April 20, when Milestone collapsed and killed the Ventrices and six others. Pat and Lisle Elsbury were haunted by the crazy capriciousness of it all: Two bars. Two couples. One tornado. Two fates.
Why did Milestone fall and Duffy's stand? Pat Elsbury tried to stop thinking about it, but she couldn't. When she drove to Utica, she kept running into the questions as if they were police roadblocks: Why Milestone and not Duffy's? Why had the tornado veered left just before it hit Duffy's, dealing it only a glancing blow, but pounced on Milestone as if on a mission?
Why was Lisle Elsbury alive and Larry Ventrice dead?
Pat, a pretty, talkative woman with strawberry blond hair and a quick laugh, soon realized that the only way to outfox her thoughts was to do what Lisle did: stay busy.
So while her husband kept an eye on the crew that was restoring Duffy's, rebuilding the brick sides and shoring up the roof, Pat was there every Saturday and Sunday. When Duffy's reopened after three weeks, Pat would wait tables and grapple with paperwork, unpack supplies and sweep floors. Anything to keep her mind away from that relentless and quietly terrifying, "Why?"
Jim Ventrice had gone to Milestone every day, for lunch or dinner or both. Now that it was gone, he had to get his meals and his companionship somewhere else.
Through the summer you'd see him at Skoog's Pub, maybe, sipping a Miller Genuine Draft, his favorite, or over at Duffy's, having a burger, or sometimes at Joy & Ed's.
Ventrice and Rich Little were the first two people rescued from Milestone's basement. While the others down there died or were forced to wait hours before being pulled out, Ventrice and Little had escaped right away. Within minutes. The building fell in all around them, but except for a few bruises and cracked ribs, both were fine.
When he'd gone down to the basement that night, Ventrice turned right at the bottom of the stairs. He stood beside Little, a stranger, over by a couple of freezers.
He didn't know why. If Little hadn't been there, Jim Ventrice believed, then he would've gone over next to his cousin Larry Ventrice or Larry's wife, Marian, Milestone's managers, and he would've absorbed the full weight of the falling slabs--the concrete roof, the second floor, the first floor--just as they had.
A week later, Jim Ventrice called Little.
"Were you in the tornado?"
"Yeah."
"I was the guy beside you."
"Well," Little said, "that freezer saved us."
Wasn't much more to it than that. Wasn't much more to say. They didn't talk philosophy or religion or predestination. The freezer had blocked the falling debris, sparing them. It was the freezer, plain and simple. Wasn't it?
Ventrice had plenty of time that summer to sort it all out. He'd walk along Mill Street, hands in his pockets, and think. He'd just about settled things in his mind: You had to live with the fact that for a lot of questions, there aren't any answers. Good people die. And God doesn't have to explain himself. It's his call.
Rich Little had moved in with Kristy Kaiser, the woman he'd been supposed to meet in Milestone. The single parents blended their families, his three kids and her three.
A month after the tornado, he bought a Harley, his longtime dream. On solitary rides he thought about that night, about how he'd been sure it would change him in some fundamental way, but it really hadn't. He was the same guy. Wasn't he?
- - - - -
Debbie Miller was writing down recipes. It was the best way she could think of to remember Milestone, a job she loved, the first outside job she'd held after 18 years. Fried chicken, burgers, spaghetti, hot wings--garlic was the secret ingredient in the wings--and steaks, all the recipes she and her boss, Larry Ventrice, had concocted together. They'd never put them on paper, because Debbie caught on quickly and repetition did the rest, and even Marian took to calling the back room of Milestone "Debbie's kitchen."
Debbie had lost so much--her son, her job, her best friends, Larry and Marian--and she wanted to hang on to what she could.
While Mike Miller sat on the porch the first two months after the tornado, feet propped on the rail, Debbie often stayed inside the small house, smoking cigarettes until the rooms were hung with a yellow-gray glaze. Blond bangs hung between Debbie's eyes and the world; straight blond hair fell down her back. The big-screen TV that dominated the living room always seemed to be on, and the Miller kids and a few of their friends and Debbie sat on couches and watched. With the curtains closed you couldn't always tell if it was day or night, unless you already knew.
But the Millers had to find a new place to live, so on an afternoon in late June, Mike, Debbie, Gregg and Chris piled into the car--they'd gotten a teal Ford Taurus to replace the LTD damaged in the tornado--and drove to LaSalle. They had called a couple of newspaper ads for rental houses.
The first one was bright blue with a wide front porch. The moment the car stopped at the curb, Chris and Gregg tumbled out and rushed over and mashed their noses against the windows to see inside: "Cool!" "Wow!"
Mike hobbled to the picture window, cupping his palms over his eyes to peer in. "Nice big living room," he said.
But Debbie didn't like it. She looked around, then folded her arms across her chest.
"It needs a lot of cleaning," she said.
A quick, hopeful response from 8-year-old Chris: "I can dust!"
They moved on, though, and reviewed a few more houses that day, a few more the next. On July 1, a week before they had to be out of the Washington Street house, they signed a lease for a good-sized stone house on a corner lot in LaSalle. By July 5, they'd left Utica.
Debbie still drove back there once a week or so for an informal support group of Milestone survivors and families that met evenings at Joy & Ed's. Jim Ventrice sometimes showed up too.
They didn't talk much about what happened that night. They talked about their lives, about their struggles, about how hard it still was to drive past the corner of Mill and Church Streets, where Milestone had stood, and where the city had put up a makeshift memorial. There were, affixed to white-painted concrete barriers, pictures of the victims and pictures of Utica from long ago.
Rising from the thin layer of gravel spread over the site was a row of white crosses, each inscribed with a name: Jay Vezain. Helen Mahnke. Bev Wood. Wayne Ball. Carol Schultheis. Marian Ventrice. Michael Miller. Lawrence Ventrice.
Shelba Bimm was leaving Utica. She wasn't going far, just to a subdivision on a hill west of town, a pretty little neighborhood of gently curving streets and polished-looking homes with wide driveways.
Bimm had loved living right in the middle of Utica. But she and her neighbors with homes crushed by the tornado faced a tangle of complications. Utica was on a flood plain, and if you rebuilt, you were required to start with an expensively high foundation. Also, state officials long had planned to redo Illinois Highway 178 to divert its noisy truck traffic, and when they did, many of the homes on Church Street would have to go.
At first, Bimm had been determined to rebuild right on the same spot. This was home. Long divorced, this was where she'd raised her two sons, Shayne and Blayne, by herself. But there was just too much up in the air. Bimm wanted to move on, to get going. She didn't like to stand still. So she bought the lot and began planning her new house.
It would be white with cranberry shutters, just like the old one. On June 21, Buck Bierbom dug the foundation, using the same equipment he'd used to help clear tons of rubble from the Milestone site.
- - - - -
Pat Elsbury had finally had enough. Enough of the dilemmas. Enough of the back-and-forth--both the highway kind and the philosophical kind.
In mid-July she gave her notice in La Grange. Her last day on the job, a job she'd had for 13 years, was July 30. She cleaned out her desk, packed her pickup and drove straight to Duffy's, where by early evening she was drinking a Miller Lite at the bar, and talking and laughing. "This is what I want to do," she said. "This is where I want to be. I don't want to be back there anymore." Simple, declarative statements.
What wasn't so simple, though, was making up for the money Duffy's had lost. It was only closed for three weeks after the tornado, but the tourists who normally thronged into Utica on summer days on their way to Starved Rock were taking other routes. They'd heard about the disaster and, according to what Lisle Elsbury was picking up here and there, they figured Utica was still in disarray. That exasperated him, but what could he do?
One Sunday afternoon in August, he was sitting in the back room of Duffy's, looking grim and discouraged. There were smudges on his forearms; he'd been struggling to fix an exhaust fan in the basement. But what really irritated Lisle was his insurance company, with whom he'd been tangling all week about repairs to the front of the tavern. The threshold was crucial, Lisle believed. The three-sided glass entrance with neat wooden trim was Duffy's signature. You just couldn't do it on the cheap. It had to be done right.
He wasn't going to compromise. He and Pat had sold their house, had sunk every nickel they had into this place, had staked their future on the corner of Mill and Canal Streets. No way would he short-change it all now because some guy in a button-down shirt with a clipboard didn't get it, didn't understand why the entrance had to be special. No way. He was a fighter, Lisle Elsbury was, and he hadn't survived a tornado just to capitulate to some insurance company.
Lisle was bothered, too, by something Pat had mentioned: When she told her boss back in La Grange goodbye for the last time, he'd given her a look. The look, she said, could have meant only one thing: You're not going to make it.
- - - - -
Pat had shrugged it off. Come and see us in a year, she wanted to shout at him. Come back and see us then.
Mike Miller returned to work part time for the railroad Nov. 9, running a locomotive. He walked with a limp and probably always would, his doctors told him. He didn't mind. "As long as I don't fall flat on my face," Mike told Debbie, "I don't care."
The Miller kids started school in LaSalle, and Mike and Debbie's biggest concern was Chris; at the threat of a storm, the merest hint of one, the quiet little boy was terrified. They alerted his teachers: If a storm came, they'd need to hold him, to tell him things would be OK.
Debbie Miller put in job applications to cook at several restaurants. No luck yet, but she was hopeful. She didn't spend her afternoons in a dark room anymore.
They still had money problems, though, and wondered how they were going to cover Christmas gifts for the kids. And they still hadn't been able to afford a headstone for Mike Jr.'s grave in Sterling, 47 miles northwest of Utica.
On Aug. 16, at about 5:30 a.m., Mike and Debbie's daughter Michelle had given birth to 5-pound, 10-ounce Melodie Marie. Debbie stayed all night at the hospital, and when she returned home mid-morning, exhausted but joyful, there was a lightness in her face that hadn't been there in a while. Her smile was tentative--she still wasn't sure about the world, after what it had taken from her--but the smile came more easily now, lingered longer. The haunted quality in her eyes had receded a bit.
Yet even as she sat on the couch that morning and talked about Melodie Marie, photos spread out on the coffee table, Debbie had to know that just above her head, high on the wall in the Millers' living room, was a picture of Mike Jr.
He was facing the camera, and the tall, skinny young man with the glasses and straight blondish-brown hair wore his mother's smile: shy, cautious, not quite sure he can trust the world, not really certain it has his best interests at heart.
By the end of November, Bimm's new house was coming along nicely. The walls were up, and so was the crisp white siding, the gray roof.
She loved to stop by and watch her contractor, Tom Trump, and his crew do their work. And she had a little more time on her hands these days; she and Dave Edgcomb had been notified Sept. 17 that they'd passed the test to be certified as EMT Intermediates, so there were no more classes.
The flat crash of hammering, the piney astringent smell of new wood: Bimm liked to walk around the job site and plan what she was going to put where. She hoped to move in by Christmas. She'd been living in a small trailer that her sons bought for her the day after the tornado, setting it up on Blayne's property.
Some afternoons Bimm would drive out to the site of her new house and just stand in the yard, taking it all in, while the wind fingered its way through the trees.
If you glanced up at the sky, the blue seemed to go on forever--up and up, straight through the roof of the world--and to spread seamlessly from horizon to horizon. So blue, so calm, so beautiful. You would almost swear nothing bad could ever come from such a sky.
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ABOUT THIS SERIES
To report this story, Tribune reporter Julia Keller interviewed the nine survivors of the Milestone collapse, and their friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues; and the friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues of the victims of the Milestone collapse; over a seven-month period, beginning a week after the tornado.
She also interviewed townspeople of Utica, Ill.; public officials, including employees and elected officials of Utica and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; meteorologists at the National Weather Service's Chicago office; tornado experts such as Howard Bluestein of the University of Oklahoma; public safety officials, including Utica Fire Chief Dave Edgcomb, Utica Police Chief Joseph Bernardoni, LaSalle County Sheriff Tom Templeton and LaSalle County Coroner Jody Bernard.
The reporter also used newspaper and television accounts of the tornado, and consulted historical books about Utica and the surrounding countryside.
Passages describing downtown Utica before and after the tornado were based on first-hand observations by the reporter, and on the observations of townspeople who were interviewed. Descriptions of the interior of Milestone the night of the tornado were based on the recollections of survivors and on the recollections of other townspeople who frequented the bar. Descriptions of the exterior were based on photographs and the accounts of Utica citizens.
Passages describing the rescue at Milestone were based on eyewitness accounts obtained from multiple interviews with firefighters, police officers, EMTs and volunteer citizen rescuers at the scene that night, along with the recollections of survivors and townspeople present shortly after the tavern collapsed.
Scenes of the Miller family's life after being rescued from Milestone--in their Utica home; sitting on the porch with Mike Miller; searching for a new home; the morning their granddaughter was born--were witnessed by the reporter. Scenes of Pat and Lisle Elsbury's life after the tornado were compiled through first-hand observation by the reporter and through interviews; thoughts and emotions attributed to the Elsburys were derived from multiple interviews with the couple.
Passages dealing with Shelba Bimm, Edgcomb, Steve Maltas, Gloria Maltas, Rona Burrows and other townspeople were based on interviews and observations by the reporter.
Scenes that were not witnessed by the reporter were assembled through multiple interviews with people who were present, both named in the story and not named. When thoughts and emotions are presented, those thoughts and emotions come directly from the reporter's interviews. Descriptions of the activities and thoughts of people who died in the collapse were compiled through interviews with those who were present, or those to whom the deceased had confided their thoughts and emotions.
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Julia Keller won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for this story on the Utica tornado
Culture, Tourism and the Self: Travels in name and space
Image by timtak
Yuji Nakanishi, professor of Tourism at Rikkyou University, points out that “Japanese tend to associate tourism with historical landmarks, but foreigners are interested in people’s lives and their lifestyles,” he said. “Places like the fish market were never really considered a tourist site until quite recently, so both sides are really confused (Tanikawa, 2009).”
"A shop owner told me in an interview: ‘Tourists from China and Japan: here in the morning full of them, but they arrive, five minutes, and run away; they have their own schedule, take a picture and hurry; they don’t stay longer; they have ten minutes to see the church, twenty to see the museum, ten to go in another place.’ These tourists are seemingly not interested in cultural heritage but in collecting the icons of that culture." (Parmeggiani et al., 2010, p110)
Japanese tourists do different things. How should we make sense of them?
Summary
Japanese travel to places for symbols where they themselves provide the sights from the imagination or bodily via auto-photography, whereas Western tourists go places for sights which they interpret and narrate in their thoughts and words. The purpose in each case, of going all that way to experience otherness, is to return to an experience of self undiluted by other.
A few days ago in the village near our beach house, a rainy day, a group of Japanese tourists went from community centre to Buddhist temple, to road side shrine, collecting stamps as part of one of those uniquely Japanese "stamp rallies." No one came to the beach in front of our house. The panoramic view of inland sea, with gulls and fishing boats and its setting sun was of no interest to them. Likewise, this jaded old Westerner can not think of a more boring, more pointless tourism experience than a traipsing around a grey landscape collecting the blotchy red imprints left by a set of rubber stamps.
As Urry (2002) famously argues, Western tourism is about going to see something. This form of tourism has a very long tradition. The picture above left is from a stained glass window in Canterbury Cathedral, England (Wells, 2002, p127, Crown Copyright NMR), the destination of Medieval Christian pilgrimage. Wells, and more famously the anthropologist Victor Turner (Turner & Turner, 1995) have argued that there is a visual bias to Christian pilgrimage, or that the destination of Christian pilgrimage is a located image, such as stained glass, a sacred image or icon.
That the Japanese word for tourism, Kankou is often glossed as "seeing the sights" persuades us that Japanese tourist too are interested in going to see. In fact the would "Kankou" originates n the Tao-Te-Ching which argues that rulers should travel to other countries so as to gain information on how better to rule their own. The passage which introduces the word "kankou" is a recommendation not to travellers but to hosts to " indicate (shiimesu) the （high）lights of your country." Even on a literal reading, "Kankou" (Japanese tourism) is about going to places where things are explained (note 0).
The stamp rally has its origins in the proof of visitation required of Japanese pilgrims during the Tokugawa period (Graburn, 1983; Reader, 2005), but before that Japanese accumulated pieces of paper stamped with sacred symbols for more than one thousand years. The religious act of Shinto, far more than prayer, is a form of pilgrimage, shrine-visiting, mairi or moude, a movement of the worshipper. And at the shrine, before amulets and sacred stamped pieces of card were distributed symbols: first branches of trees and stones, later stamped pieces of paper. The destinations provided the names. The destinations were the named places, the "meisho". But did Japanese pilgrimage destinations provide the sights?
Not only in the stamp rally but in many forms of Japanese tourism is the sight strangely eschewed. I can remember my disappointment when taken to the the ancient seat of regional government at Dazaifu to find only an empty field. Japanese tourists visit castle towns, such as the most famous, Hagi, where there is NO CASTLE TO BE SEEN! They visit ruins ('of identity' see Hudson, 1999; Plutschow, 1981) such as that visited by Matsuo Basho, where there is NOTHING to be SEEN at all. Hudson, citing Plutschow (1981, p22) argues that, "Basho' choice of ato (ruin) was itself derived from the medieval Japanese tradition of travel diaries, wherein the significance of a place was determined by its history - its location in time, rather than by geography."
Traditionally shrines, the destination Japanese par excellence contained a prototypical meibutsu, the God-body (goshintai) of the shrine that might be a mirror, sword, jewel, or sacred stone but it was *forbidden to see this item*. The goshintai was situated symbolically . It was wrapped up in layer upon layer of cloth, box, inner shrine, out shrine and shrine walls (Hendry, 1995; Pilgrim, 1986; Bachnik & Quinn, 1994) partly to ensure that it was never seen at all. Shrines have the structure of an onion. The visitor may never become aware that there is anything at their centre, other than the fact that the visitor knows that something is there, symbolically. After all, shrines are the prototypical, great and famous, named place (meisho).
According to an informant, a Japanese tour guide, the vast majority of Japanese tourists visiting Ise Shrine today, visit the woods around the shrine, see at most its outer walls, and the souvenir shop, and the car park. Japanese tourists have thronged to Ise for centuries (especially inspired by stories of sacred symbols falling from the sky (fudaori), but without special appointment they do not see the shrine itself, much less the holy of hollies, the mirror of the sun goddess, the goshintai, prototypical named-thing (meibutsu) at its centre. Even those that do have special dispensation to enter the outer walls of Ise Shrine will be faced with that which Guichard-Anguis (2007) describes as the biggest difference between pilgrimage to Ise compared with that in Europe; the shrine building itself will have been rebuilt within the last twenty years. Even though Japanese are noted for their fondness of historical attractions, not only do they go to visit empty sites or 'ruins', the Japanese rebuild even the old sites and buildings anew. This is not just in the case of Ise Shrine but also in the case of Japanese homes, and Castles such as Osaka castle, as bewailed by XYZ.
The fact that sights are not so important as named significance may also explain the lack of attention to the maintenance of visual "authenticity," even in places such as Tokyo. Tomomitsu-Tomasson (2005) a research student in sociology, expresses her disappointment at arriving in Kyoto with a quote from Kerr's damning portrait of the dark side of Japan (2002).
“How must Kyoto appear to one who has never visited here? Passersby clad in kimono going to and fro along quiet narrow streets between temples, rows of houses with black wooden lattices, glimpsed over tiled roofs the mountains covered with cherry blossoms, streams trickling at one’s feet….the traveler’s expectations must be high – until the moment when he alights from the Bullet train. He leaves the station, catches his first sight of Kyoto Tower, and from there on it is all shattered dreams. Kyoto Hotel cuts off the view of the Higashiyama hills, and big signs on cheap clothing stores hide Mount Daimonji.Red; vending machines are lined up in front of the temples. It’s the same miserable scenery you see everywhere in Japan, and the same people oblivious to it all” (Professor Tayama Reishi direct quote) (Kerr 2001:164/65). in Tomomitsu-Tomasson (2005), p 4.
In my new home town of Yamaguchi I have written about how sad it is that less is done to maintain traditional urban architecture such as in Tatekouji Street, since it is this type of sight, that is the essence of a tourist attraction and destination. That Japanese are happy to visit Kyoto and Yamaguchi without demanding visual authenticity is again a result of their relative lack of interest in the visual dimension of tourist destinations.
Finally, it just seems to me that the Japanese are not so interested in views. The fact that I continue to live in an more recently purchases house with excellent views, or that I have a panoramic view from the window where I now write drives this home. I feel considerable empathy with the words of the Blondie song, "All I want is a room with a view," and seek to live in places which command a view. In Japan, however it is said that "high places attract smoke and stupid people," and while the high places may be elevated social positions, I think that it may also apply to the more literal interpretation. Perhaps part of my preference for views is my stupid desire to look down on things and other people.
Why do Japanese go to these symbolically significant named-places places, rather to interpret visual sites?
It seems to me that the answer can be found in theories of the Western, and Japanese self.
Here I should have a long introduction to (cross cultural psychology)
Origins in Triandis' Hofestede' collectivism
Markus and Kitayama turn around
Heine rejection of the need for self regard
Oyserman/Takano/Yamagishi attacks on collectivism
Hong YY and more so, Nisbett/Masuda cognitive turn
Kim and Non-Linguistic thought, and in her second paper on that topic on self expression, the non-linguistic self
And then ask what, phenomenologically is the self in the West and Japan like? What is it like to have an independent self? What is felt to be self? What is felt to be not self? How can one have a "interdependent self" what does hat feel like? What phenomena are felt to be self in that situation?
And then me (ha!)
For the Westerner, the self is the self narrative. Tourists of the MacCannelian or Cullerian kind visit and play ethnographer or semiologist (MacCannell, 1976; Culler, 1988) regarding the sights that they see. The Western tourists provides the narrative because they are narrative and the sight is the otherness which they attempt to interpret. To these tourists the things that they see are signs but they are signs which have the structure of an alibi (Culler, 1988; Barthes,1972), signing off to a meaning which the tourist, in their phonetic inner narrative, provides. The Western tourists may take of photo of the sight, or better still purchase a photo upon the reverse of which she will narrate herself in this location. The Western tourist goes to see and say. Like ethnologists or anthropologists they use the phenomenological technique of bracketing away preconceptions (the more other unusual, opaque to the interpretations that they have to hand that a sight is the more that task is performed for them) and then they make pronouncement upon the sights that they see. This transcendental meditation employed by Western Anthropologists and Tourists alike, can be described in the following way,
From this new transcendental standpoint Husserl maintained that the manifold stream of contingent world-objects could be perceived in a new way, giving 'a new kind of experience: transcendental experience'. The transcendental ego because a 'disinterested onlooker' whose only motive is neutrally to describe 'what he sees, purely as seen, as what is seen and seen in such and such a manner' (Rayment-Pickard, 2003)
Japanese tourists on the other hand do not go to provide symbols about sights, but to provide sights or images regarding symbolic locations. The symbolic sites visited by Japanese tourists, the named places, the named things, do not have the structure of the alibi (see Hansen, 1993) but are the signs themselves. That Japanese tourists go to places with literary, historical, named significant, that they vistic symbolic geographies as been ascribed (as all things Japanese always are) to their "groupism," and also, in the face of Westernisation, to their nostalgic desire to return to their historical routes, to their self. This latter interpretation hits the mark I think because the Japanese self is a space (Kanjin; Hamaguchi, 1997) , a primordial space (Nishida 1993; Watsuji 1979; see Mochizuki, 2006) a mirror (Kurozumi). When the self is a space, then the concept of travel presents inherent difficulties. How can space travel? I argue that the Japanese tourists' interest in historical, literary, or otherwise famous named-places, and named-things is because it is not the place but the name that they are visiting. The Japanese travel to places precisely because they are "encrusted with renown," (Culler); and are all the more happy if as at shrines, or ruins, their is nothing to see because it is in the space of their mind that they provide the images to go with the otherness of the symbols that they are visiting. Indeed in a sense they do see that holy of holies, the mirror of the sun goddess in the internal space that is the Japanese mind.
Lacan argues that the self is at the presumed intersection of linguistic self signification -self narration, and visual self reflection, mirrorings and imagingings. Neither the symbolic nor the imaginary can say or see itself. The word can not enunciate the enunciated even in time since it is always delayed, defered (Derrida, 1998), never the person that it was what the attempt was started. Husserl's "living present" is always already gone. Likewise, the minds eye is unable to see itself. It requires the admixture of an other, the image of oneself, the name of oneself for each to enable the self to wrap around upon itself and self itself into self hood. This admixture is to be kept to a minimum. The self image in the West is external, when identified a sign of vanity or 'narcissism'. The word or symbol in Japan is external, and when internalised an impurity of mind (See Kim, 2002).
In either case, these essential impurities or 'supplements,' which are both required to complete and are additional to self(Derrida, 1998) are washed away in the experience of tourism when the Western and Japanese tourist meets the other as image or symbol respectively. The transcendental meditation for the Japanese tourist, at the British Museum, at the Named Place ruin of a famous castle, at the walls of Ise Shrine, becomes a interested visualiser of the place hidden in time, behind those walls. Souzou ga fukuramu. Images spring to mind. And even as the "Kankou" they shut their eyes to the world (Hitomi wo Tojiru) and call to mind the glory of the place they are visiting and in that experience, see themselves as the visual space, place or soul, that they believe themselves to be.
If either the Western tourist leaves something of himself it narratival. He signs a guest book. He narrates himself on a postcard (postcards are not sold for writing upon in Japan but only as packs, as symbolic souvenirs).
The Japanese tourist on the other hand provides the images, not just in her own mind, but also in the form of auto-photography so central to the tourism experience in Japan.
These differences have important implications for the tourist industries catering to Western and Japanese tourists.
When serving Japanese tourists it is important to provide the names, the narrative the guidebooks (which Japanese tourists themselves prepare in relative abundance), the words. They must also be provided the opportunity to provide images: above all to to imagine, and also to photograph themselves. Tourist destinations that do not have words related to them (iware no nai) are not of interest. Japanese tourist travel all the way to the lake district in the North of England, ignoring the beauty of the Powys hills completely, because the former have no literature - no words associated with them. They avoid the markets of London concentrating on the British museum and tower since the latter are redolent with renown. Japanese tourism providers need to counter the ocular turn of contemporary tourism theory and as the Japanese policy paper at the start of the ”tourism-oriented country" advocates a return to the original meaning of Kankou, or rather the provision of Kankou, which is not merely in the gaze directed, but in the of indication of facts, of nominal, symbolic entities.
"When promoting tourism it is therefore essential to return to this [etymological] origin of tourism, and create revolution in the very notion of tourism. The origin of tourism is not just looking at famous places and scenery, or seeing the sights, in regard to the the things that the local population feel happy about, to the things that the inhabitants of a certain land feel proud of and "indicating these highlights." (note 1)
Those especially in Japan however, who are catering to Western tourists should be aware that a place does not need to have a name for the Western tourist to want to visit it. In fact it helps if (other than the "markers" to find it) the destination is un-named "authentic" since the Western visitor provides the words. He is the words that he provides. These ethnographic, phenomenological tourists want to narrate, pronounce, theorise (what I am now doing) about the things that they see and in so doing they (I make myself shiver) have a transcendental experience of who they are, the words that drift across the universe of 'exterior' visual phenomena. Give us a view, any view, something to speak about, a picture and postcard, a picture postcard, above all give us something to see and some means by which they can narrate and we will be happy. There are such opportunities in every Japanese village not only the famous ones. Western tourist go to see spaces and places, and there is (or should be) much more for them to see. Alas at present, or until recently, the Japanese presume that their visitors are also Japanese and "indicate the highlights" (Kankou) or show the Named-places only. Very recently, there is a trend to promote regional tourism resources which do not have a name, this geographical tourism (shock!) had to be given a neologism "jitabi," since the very concept of simply going to see a place was alien to the Japanese.
Finally the above theoretical position resolves the problem how tourists can be going in search of authenticity (MacCannell, 1986) even in blatantly inauthentic "post tourism" (Urry, 2002) sites: on tour we bring ourselves to confront the other of the self, we find our self in maximal authenticity.
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note o
「易経」の「観国之光利用賓于王」（「国の光を観しめす（みるとも読む）、もって王の賓たるに用いるによろし」と読む）、すなわち「国」とは、当時の中国の状況からみてひとつの地域を表し「光」とは、地域のすぐれたものないし特色を意味するとされる。
The [relevant passage] of the Tao Te Ching reads "*Indicating* [Shimesu, Kanagmiru] the lights of the country are good to use as hospitality for a king". where country mean the localities of contemporary China, and "lights" [highlights] refer to the superior or special things of that locality. (my translation, my emphasis, and my comments in brackets).
note 1
観光立国の推進に当たっては、まずはこうした「観光の原点」に立ち返ること、つまり「観光」概念の革新が必要になる。観光の原点は、ただ単に名所や風景などの「光を見る」ことだけではなく、一つの地域に住む人々がその地に住むことに誇りをもつことができ、幸せを感じられることによって、その地域が「光を示す」ことにある。 「国の光を観る」 −観光の原点−
note 2
I think that the primordial space of the Japanese self (Nishida's ba), or the "climate" (Wasuji's fudo) can best be understood from a Western perspective as the "Field of Vision" (Mach, 1897). The visual field pictured in Mach's self portrait is usually seen, if existing at all, as being a form of barrier ("veil" "tain" or "hymen") between self and the world. To the Japanese this field, this primordial space, however, is the pure experience of self (Nishida, Zen no kenkyuu), as self-inseparable-from-spatial-other. This Japanese self is however separate from the world of symbols but, Japanese need the admixture of symbol, the name, their own name, for the Japanese child to believe that the their body houses this ephemeral mirror. In Japan it is precisely the linguistic which is public (Nakashima, 1997) and space, place and vision which as private as it gets. Taking a balanced view, neither images nor language are more private than the other, both requiring an other to have meaning, but it took Westerners almost two millenia to realise that language is meaningless if private (Wittgenstein, 1973).
recycled greenhouse for fruit cage
Image by Rob 'n' Rae
just got to add the netting
The greenhouse in question was one of those cheap slot together ones with a plastic cover. Basically a bigger version of the one in the pic. Sadly the cover split in the winter allowing the wind in which completely wrecked the rest of the cover and bent a few bits of the frame. Its not expensive to replace the greenhouse but it seemed such a shame to throw out all the metal poles and joints.
So after a bit of thought we realised we could use them to make the frames for fruit cages to protect our soft fruit from the birds.
Also in the pic are the strawberries growing in a set of my old car tires. There are some sheets of toughened glass we got from freecycle over the top of them supported on some old wooden blocks to give them a bit of shelter and protection.
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