Crying Wolf and Letting Go

I went for a walk in the drizzle today. Actually, it started as a walk in the mist, but ended as a walk in the drizzle. Both were very pleasant. Having grown up in a semi-arid climate, I still get a thrill when it rains a lot. And it has rained a lot this week, as if someone has been turning a giant spigot in the sky on and off at random intervals.

Weather in general was a prominent topic, what with hurricane Joaquin roaring in the Atlantic. The hurricane buzz was a new experience for me. I’ve heard the siren testing before, but this is the first time I’ve received warnings of potential landfall.

I wasn’t sure how seriously to take all the noise. When it snows, there is an endearing sort of panic in this town that befuddles me (the Utah part of me has a hard time worrying about a few inches of snow) and I wondered if the hurricane reaction was along similar lines. I know hurricanes are materially different from snowstorms, but I still felt a little like the villagers who heard the shepherd boy cry wolf too many times.

Happily, Joaquin has turned out to sea (following the European prediction rather than the five or six American predictions that showed it crashing into the US coast) and left us to heavy rains and coastal flooding, which is quite enough without the addition of severe wind damage.

Anyway, back to my walk in the mist and drizzle. One purpose of my walk was to feed the ducks, but I didn’t succeed at that. I might have offended them; shortly after I offered them a snack, they quacked at me (as if commenting on my impertinence) and stalked off in a line with their bills in the air. Maybe I should have brought them something better than stale Cheerios. (I’ve also learned this year that our ducks don’t like corn chips. Perhaps they’re a strictly bread-and-crackers bunch.)

The other purposes of going for a walk were to get outside, to enjoy the weather, to move around a bit, and, most importantly, to think. I do my best thinking when my mind and my feet are both free to wander. I was thinking about the lesson I’ve been learning this year.

Each year here at school has had a sort of theme, one major idea marking a change in my perspective, feelings, and understanding. During my first year, it was a lesson on humility and doing things that are a different kind of hard. Last year, it was about the beauty of grace.

So far this year, the lesson is about letting go. Elder Bednar partially summed up the idea when he quoted Elder Hales in the Sunday afternoon session of General Conference: “When you cannot do what you have always done, you only do what matters most.” Letting go has also been about relinquishing my own expectations and wants – some that are small, and some that seem large now but will probably look very small when tempered by adequate hindsight.

You might say I’m still learning both lessons: how much to worry about a hurricane warning and how to let go. Of course, it’s still early in the year, so I have time.

Eclectivity

I recently opened a new package of notebook paper. Unlike most of my classmates, I take notes by hand rather than on my computer. I’m hoping this will be my last paper package. If not, I’m probably taking WAY too many notes.

Speaking of notes, here are some eclectic notes from my recent life:

As I read, I like to move. My ideal world would be one in which I could read and run at the same time. (Yes I know books on tape exist, but I don’t like running with things in or on my ears.) Since running and reading isn’t really an option, I do a good amount of walking and reading. But textbooks get heavy (and looking down too long causes sore necks) so I also do a LOT of sitting and standing around reading. That’s when my hands start playing with things, most recently a yo-yo and a slinky.

During classes I usually play with the elastic or bracelet I have around my wrist. I wonder how my professors would react to a yo-yo . . .

In History of the Common Law we recently read the Magna Carta, an appropriate activity for its 800^th birthday. My professor showed up in a celebratory polo shirt. (You can find souvenir items at magnacarta800th.com.) I learned that one ancient copy of the Magna Carta spent WWII safely hiding in Fort Knox.

Along with Magna Carta, we read the Charter of the Forest, which is the Magna Carta’s forgotten little brother, so to speak. Forest laws were a unique, often vilified portion of English law pertaining to royal forests (which, counter-intuitively, involve much more than just woods). Of course, Robin Hood came up during this class (it was only a matter of time in a class about historical English law).

As I was walking down DOG Street one day,
the governor drove by on his way to the capital.
He interrupted a heated street argument about
Parliament closing the port of Boston.

Switching to Admiralty, the best opinion I’ve ever read (even better than the haunted house rescission) is Margate Shipping Co. v. Montco Offshore Inc. (143 F.3d 976). It starts out, “’Twas a dark and very stormy night . . .”, goes on to cite the law of ancient Rhodes, and heaps accolades on the aptly named and deserving Captain Strong. The judge who wrote it must have been in a good mood. Either that or he/she moonlights as a serial novelist.

My Admiralty professor recommended a website: marinetraffic.com. Just in case you’re wondering which ships are in the neighborhood.

My other Admiralty professor (there are two) spent our last class discussing treasure salvage. He was involved in the litigation surrounding the salvage of the Central America, which sank with so much gold that it contributed to the economic panic of 1857. One of the largest gold bars in history, over 900 oz., was retrieved from the wreck. My professor got to see the gold piled up in the Brinks vault where it was stored. (He was working on the insurance company side, which was awarded about 10% of the treasure; in his words, their portion “wasn’t a huge amount; it was like $10 million.”)

This desperate onion has been
in my fridge a little too long.
I think Desperate Onion is a
great name for a rock band.

In Copyright, we discussed the copyright-ability of a series of choreographed yoga poses (no go), an undulating bike rack (nope), and a belt buckle (if it is a Winchester-type with independent artistic value, yes!). Copyright is intriguing because it prompts me to look up things like Winchester belt buckles and the Hindenburg disaster footage. Ah the joy of copyright law in the era of Google and YouTube. (After I Googled “Winchester belt buckle”, belt buckle ads started showing up in my browser.)

My most recent favorite quotation from Copyright: “[They are] both working in the genre of large freaky puppets . . .”

My favorite quotation from a chapter on Talmudic (Jewish) law in my Comparative Law textbook: “Creation is a hard act to follow.” (H. Patrick Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 5^th Ed. 2014, 117.)

I’ve also recently been reading an undergrad textbook because I’m working as a graduate assistant for a business professor who is teaching a course on the legal environment of business. After two years of hyper-technical law books, the undergrad book seems almost laughingly simple. The legally-trained part of me wants to qualify everything and point out all the nuances. In other words, my default answer has officially become the very lawyerly, “It depends . . .”

And in case you’re wondering, there are 33 weeks left until graduation. I counted.

I was reading by the lake one day
when a flotilla of geese came by.

Versus the Wild Turkey

One of the great things about admiralty law is reading the names people give their boats. The “Wild Turkey” is my favorite so far.

Another benefit is the frequent telling of sea stories. My professor was in the Navy and has practiced maritime law for a long time, so he has some good ones about the crazy things that happen in the navigable waters of the Unites States. His stories are frequently accompanied by illustrations – rough sketches on the board of some harbor or another. He is fond of introducing them by saying something like, “Of course, you all recognize this as the San Juan, Puerto Rico harbor because of the palm trees I’ve drawn on the peninsula.”

One of the first considerations in admiralty law is whether the case involves a “vessel.” An object doesn’t become a vessel just by being able to float (a floating log is probably not a vessel; a yacht probably is). For example, does an inflatable bubble designed to work like a human hamster wheel and allow someone to run on water count as a vessel? (My professor terms this device an “aquabubble.” Reza Baluchi used one in an attempt to run the Bermuda triangle, but was picked up by the Coast Guard somewhere in the middle of his course.)

One of the other fun things about admiralty law is you can sue a vessel and have it arrested, as if it were a person. (My professor jocularly termed the arrest a “habeus grabbus.”) That’s how you end up with a court case called So-and-So versus the Wild Turkey. It’s a little bit of a strange notion, but has a long history (longer, indeed, than the existence of the United States).

Another strange notion came up as I was reading part of Justinian’s Institutes (one of the oldest written law texts in the western world). A provision was included for ownership rights related to pursuing a swarm of bees. The idea, of course, is to hive them and harvest their honey; but I don’t know that I’d have the gumption to pursue my bee swarm if it decided to move on to greener pastures.

The wacky stories continued in Copyright, where we read a case involving a photograph of a man holding his daughter on his shoulders (taken for a local newspaper). Federal Law enforcement became very interested in the photo because, as it turned out, the man was impersonating a Rockefeller and had abducted his daughter (there was a custody battle going on). As my professor put it, the story “not surprisingly became a made-for-TV movie” and a copyright battle ensued over whether the photo that was created for the movie infringed the original copyright.

And then there was the Supreme Court doctrine we studied in First Amendment this week. I won’t try to explain it, but my professor described it best when he said, “It’s mind blowing on so many levels.”

Come to think of it, that comment applies to a lot of what I’ve learned in law school.

This Would Be Easier If I Spoke Latin . . .

I spent most of one day this week reading a medieval law textbook: Decretum, by Gratian. (I’m enough of a nerd that I actually enjoyed it.) It left me with the impression that the practice of law hasn’t changed much in the last thousand years, although nowadays there is much less discussion about the superior authority of the church.

The Decretum was originally written in Latin. I, of course, read an English translation; otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten much out of it. One of my other books was also translated from another language. This only becomes a problem when I’m reading the footnotes, many of which were not translated. I’ll be reading, reading, reading, and . . . something in French . . . reading, reading . . . something in Spanish . . . reading, reading, reading . . . something else in French . . . reading, reading, reading . . . is that Italian?

It feels like a game of “Name That Language” (. . . German? . . .) The Decretum has a footnote in Greek, but the translators were kind enough to put an English translation for that as well.

In other history news, we read a very old case that would have been among the first malpractice cases on record (if they had malpractice back then). It involved a property dispute between a younger son and his older illegitimate brother. When the younger son’s lawyer began to lose the argument, he tried to bring up the older brother’s illegitimacy. The judge flatly told him that he plead the wrong thing to make that argument and the older brother won.

We also discussed trial by ordeal (for example, throwing someone in water to determine if they are guilty by whether they float or not) and trial by contest (accusing someone of a misdeed and challenging them to a duel to determine guilt). In England, these methods eventually gave way to trial by getting-a-bunch-of-people-from-a-few-nearby-villages-to-give-testimony. That was the early beginnings of trial by jury.

Part of this legal evolution took place during the reign of King John, whose movements are so well documented that there is a website dedicated to his daily itinerary. He was involved in increasing the penalty for serious crimes (later to be known as felonies) from merely having your foot cut off and given 40 days to abjure the realm (that is, leave the country) to having your foot and your hand cut off and being forced to leave. And those who were acquitted of serious crimes weren’t much better off; they were also given 40 days to abjure the realm, though they did get to keep all of their limbs and possessions.

Trial by ordeal is not extinct, by the way. In Comparative Law, we are studying chthonic law (also known as customary law; that is the type of oral, traditional law you find in societies the western world calls “aboriginal” or “developing”). Liberia, for example, has a long tradition of trials by ordeal. Some of their methods are severe, but others are pretty benign. And in a customary law system, which is heavily focused on returning harmony to the community, trial by ordeal can be an efficient way to solve contentions and pacify both the accuser and the accused.

Meanwhile in Copyright, we’ve discussed the concept of fixation; something has to be fixed in a physical medium to be copyrighted. (In other words, you can’t copyright a thought.) “So,” my professor asked, “can you copyright skywriting?” (For the record, I have no idea. But these are the kinds of questions I spend my days pondering.)

A copyright also requires a modicum of creativity (illustrated nicely by an old case about copyrighting circus posters) and some originality. The originality requirement raised a conundrum for a scholar who was trying to fill in the missing gaps of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The more accurate his work was, the less original it would be; if it was not original, he couldn’t copyright it and another scholar would be free to steal and publish his work.

That wouldn’t have been a problem for me, of course, because I don’t read Hebrew. Or Latin. Or Greek. Or . . .

___________

Favorites of the week:

• Professor quotation (from Admiralty): “What do jet skis do? They hit things.”

• SCOTUS quotation: “The English language has a number of words and expressions which by general consent are ‘fighting words’ when said without a disarming smile.” Justice Murphy, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), emphasis added.

• Picture: abandoned ships in San Francisco Bay during the 49er gold rush (the sailors went to find gold, leaving the harbor clogged with empty ships)

• Song: Ancient Sea, by Elephant Revival (thanks to NPR for the recommendation)

The Last First Day

One week down, fourteen weeks and three finals left.

Yes, it was the first week of school and yes, I’m already counting down the semester.

My week didn’t go as badly as that comment implies, though. Overall, I found my classes reasonably interesting and my schedule far from onerous. Even the day I spent reading the ominously titled book The Hanged Man was intriguing and pleasant enough.

It was strange to have my last first day of school. During my other last years of school, even in college, I always expected to go back to school at some point. This time I don’t. Unless there is some plan for my life that I’m not aware of, this will be my last year of scholastic endeavors. As I was laying wide awake (unable to sleep) in the early morning before classes started, I considered taking a picture of myself on the deck, wearing my backpack and a big smile as I headed off to school for the last first time. (That idea died when my alarm went off about four hours after I finally fell asleep.)

My panacea for not being able to sleep is usually a story. Often I tell myself a good enough (bad enough?) story to put myself to sleep. Other times I read a book. On Monday, I pulled out Ramona Quimby, Age 8. It was a good choice because one of the first few chapters tells about Ramona’s first day of school – in third grade. It was a nice reminder of what first days were like when I was a kid. And in some ways, my last first day was the same: the mental worst case scenarios didn’t happen; neither did the heroic daydreams. The last first day went by as it usually does, with a little anxiety and self-consciousness, a little amusement, and an overall sort of contented moving onward-ness.

And that held true for the rest of the week. I worked my way through it, all the while trying not to think about how long it felt, trying not to go crazy, and enjoying the new subjects in equal measure.

_________________________

Here’s a run-down of my classes:

Admiralty Law:

• I wasn’t sold on this class after reading the introductory materials (which were waxing somewhat rhapsodic about it), but I think it will be interesting enough. We spent part of the first day watching a video for maritime professionals about several ships running aground. The one involving drunk sailors, a birthday party, and an inexplicable u-turn was a classic example of a the-weirdest-things-only-happen-in-real-life-and-law-school event.
• Admiralty is uniquely universal. It may involve an American ship, a Panamanian captain, a German owner, a Russian first mate, and a South Korean crew (or any other combination of nationalities). This raises the issue of language barriers. Usually they aren’t a problem, but (as was remarked in class) when something goes wrong, everyone panics in their native language.
• My professor gave us a mnemonic device for remembering some maritime jargon: “port” has four letters; so does “left”; so, port = left. “Starboard” has more than four letters; so does “right”; so, starboard = right.
• Maritime jurisdiction can be a little unexpected. For example, a plane that crashed in a Great Lake (after running into a flock of birds) did not fall under maritime law, while a train wreck in the middle of Georgia did (for contractual transoceanic shipping reasons).

Comparative Law:

• This class discusses the differences between legal systems (Asian verses Talmudic verses European, for example), including underlying motivations, prevalence, sources of law, etc. We’ll spend most of our time on non-Western systems, which appeals to the part of me that is a geography nerd.
• As an illustration of cross-cultural differences, my professor showed us a gesture (similar to the American single-handed gesture for “give me some money”) which means different things in different parts of the world. In Egypt it means “be patient”; in Greece it means “that’s so great!”; in Italy it means “what do you mean?”
• My professor claims that this class produces students that drive everyone else in the building nuts. (We start asking questions about things everyone else takes for granted: why things are done a certain way and why they can’t be done differently.)

Copyright

• My first day of reading for this class was a little dreary, but it was not as dreary as I expect Federal Tax Law would have been.
• I anticipate that the class sessions, at least, will be entertaining. Our first class involved several audio and visual aids, as you might expect would be useful for this subject. (My professor mentioned that she should find out who teaches next door and apologize for the noise.)

First Amendment: Free Speech & Press

• I’m a little leery of the offensive material that will be (unavoidably) covered in this class, and I still think modern Constitutional law is somewhat made up, but Con law always generates interesting debates. And it has a tendency toward the sort of policy and big picture arguments I like to think about (as opposed to the minutiae of some other areas of law).
• On the first day we read the text of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Our professor said we might look at it again during the semester, but not because the Supreme Court cites it. The Court apparently skips over the text and jumps straight to the principles.
• The Court is also in love with mingling fire metaphors into its free speech doctrine. This is where “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic” comes from, after all. (Schenck v. United States, 249 US 47 (1919).) In our first few cases there was much discussion of conflagrations, matches, and the like.

History of the Common Law:

• This class will likely be a never-ending source of amusement. My professor mentioned to us that barrister’s wigs (the big, curly, grey-hair kind) are expensive. “I’ve looked into this,” he said.
• Apparently, avoiding jury duty has always been a thing. In some instances, judges have just told the sheriffs to just find some people standing around and put them on the jury just so the case could finally go forward.
• Then there’s the memorable story of a defendant who was so outraged at receiving a writ summoning him to court that he made the man who delivered the writ eat it – wax seal and all.
• And, for those who want to sue someone while they are in Williamsburg, you can buy a writ from the colonial printer on DOG Street. I think you can even get it signed and sealed after you fill in the person’s name.
• My favorite line from The Hanged Man: “English courts [as opposed to French] did not allow the use of torture on suspects and this was a great obstacle to obtaining confessions.” (Robert Bartlett, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 132)
• The Danes, though they didn’t impact English very much, did give us one valuable snippet of language. “Law” comes from the Danish word “laga.” As has been pointed out by someone more familiar with classical languages than I am, prior to the Danish addition, the word for law was the Latin word ae (or æ). So without the Danes, lawyers today would just be called “ers”.

Atypicality

Summer break is officially over. Classes start this week and I spent last week slowly getting back into law school mode.

That meant, first of all, buying books. (I ended up with a nine-book-high stack and, happily, spent less than I expected). It also meant reading syllabi and starting on homework.

I have five classes, but I only started reading for one of them: History of the Common Law. The reading was an overview of the subject and it required a lot of Googleing of archaic words and Latin phrases. It also made me feel like I ought to know much more about the English royal line and the British judicial system than I do.

Still, the reading was entertaining. The authors noted, for example, that when the French came into Britain with William the Conqueror, they could not administer English laws in the French-style courts because “for one thing, they [the laws] were unintelligible” (Sketch*, 31). The authors also mentioned the influence of Italian jurisprudence, from which the English appropriated “some great maxims and a few more concrete rules” (Sketch, 42). I admire the English tendency to adopt maxims wherever they’re found.

Also, the reading taught me what an outlaw is, or was between 1066-1216 AD: if a person was told (usually by proclamation) to present himself before a county court, but failed to appear four times in a row, during the fifth court session he would be outlawed. That was not a great position to be in because the sentence for outlawry was death; and under the old law, it was the right and duty of “every true man” to carry out the sentence wherever the outlaw was found. (Sketch, 67-68.)

Meanwhile, the “benefit of the clergy” exempted anyone who could read (or who could fake it by memorizing the correct words) from capital punishment (Sketch, 73). This “benefit” morphed over the years from one used by clergy to one used by laymen, including laymen in Colonial Williamsburg. In the colony, the criminal could claim the benefit once (no reading required), meaning instead of being executed, he’d be branded on the hand. If he was later involved in another crime, he’d lose his life.

I also learned that the last heretic case was in 1612; but it was only much later in the Act of 1677 that the burning of heretics was declared illegal (Sketch, 144). And people could be charged with witchcraft in Britain until 1736 (Sketch, 158).

All of which helps me appreciate modern law a bit more.

Another sign of the approaching school year was filling out my graduation application. On the one hand, it was a very satisfying thing to do (a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel sort of thing, even though I still have a third of the work left). On the other hand, calling it an “application” makes the graduation decision sound much more tenuous than it is, as though someone is going to look through all the applications and decide which are best and get to graduate, then keep the rest on file for future reference.

Also, there is an $85 fee for graduating, which feels a little harsh. Part of me wishes they’d just hide that fee in with the regular fees and tuition rather than show that three years of tuition was not enough for that little piece of paper, a gown, and a funny hat. But whatever.

The last sign of the approaching school year is an upswing in questions about what I intend to do after graduation. On this subject, I’m either slow or atypical or both. I don’t have a job yet (some of my classmates do), nor do I have a solid idea of what I want to do.

But I’ve never really felt like I fit into the law school mold. And I have time to work that out.

I’m okay with being atypical.

___________

* All internal references are to Maitland & Montague, A Sketch of English Legal History, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York and London 1915.

Summer Part 3

Well, ask and ye shall receive. I wanted a little more adventure for the summer; my friend Jennifer needed to use some vacation time; put those together and viola! One more week of fun before the school year starts.

The best parts of the week – laughing, talking, laying aside the stress of normal life – can’t be easily documented. But, at the risk of sounding like a travelogue, here are some of the highlights of our weeklong venture:

The Governor's Palace

 We spent a very hot day at Colonial Williamsburg. While checking the weather on my phone, I inadvertently stumbled across a good illustration of the difference between the Virginia climate and the Utah climate. As displayed on my weather widget:

Temperature in Salt Lake City = 86, feels like 84.

Temperature in Williamsburg = 96; feels like 105.

And that’s why I don’t plan on living any farther south than I already do.

The newest building in Williamsburg:
the Market House.

Printing the Declaration of Independence
at the colonial printshop.

Happily, it wasn’t too hot to keep us from enjoying the day. We went to the military encampment and were immediately taken up as new recruits, whereupon we were drilled in the proper methods of lining up, marching, and firing rifles. (For future reference, rifles go “BOOM!” They do not go “bang” or “pow.” And they never go “pew! pew! pew!”) We were also shown how to fire a cannon and instructed on how to tighten the snares on a drum. Afterward, our commanding officer told us to report at 7 am the next morning for further training. We were told we wouldn’t get breakfast until our training improved, so we blatantly disobeyed that order and went AWOL.

This cannon goes off periodically throughout
the day as a demonstration for new recruits.

Jennifer putting her new military
skills to use in the guardhouse.

We also went to the cabinet-making shop, where you can find everything from a cradle to a coffin, but mostly chairs and desks and cabinets. The best item is, perhaps, a handmade harpsichord, which you can play if you ask nicely (we did).

Jennifer's harpsichord playing earned
a round of applause.

Another highlight of that day was the brick yard. The colonists dig up the clay and mix in water by stomping through it over and over again. After getting the rocks out, they move it to a second pit and let the visitors join in. Result: many muddy feet and a lot of happy children. (They let adults in too. I was tempted, but I was wearing white pants and thought getting in a pit of clay might not end well. Hopefully I’ll get back there another time when I’m more appropriately attired.)

The professionals are very kind to find
all the rocks before they put the
tourists to work stomping in the
clay pits.

Following the stomping, the bricks are formed in wooden molds, left to dry, and fired (which is done by building a kiln over the stacks of bricks, then burning fires between them for about a week).  The fire changes the bricks’ colors. They start out a light tan. They end up anywhere from a pale red (if they’re far from the heat) to a deep red (the best variety, not too close to the heat, but not too far away) to black (if they’re right by the flames).

The bricks have to dry out for several weeks
before they can be fired. There are thousands
waiting for the fiery furnace.

This is a dry, but as yet unfired brick.

The brickmakers gave us another good east coast climate explanation. We were told that out west, bricks can just be left to dry, then go straight into a building. But here in the humidity, they’ll crumble if they aren’t fired to get all the moisture out. The Williamsburg brick yard is the only fully operating fired brickmaker (if I remember correctly), so they get large orders for their wares from many places.

The magazine houses a very big gun
(over 5 feet long, I think) . . .

. . . and a very small cannon.

After a few more stops and traversing DOG Street several times, we ended the day with some cinder toffee, which is fabulous not only because it’s tasty, but also because it looks wacky.

And this is cinder toffee.
Yes, that is only one piece.

She's smiling a little too much
considering she's in the gaol.

And this is me cheerfully trying to escape.

The fife and drum corps is more colorful
in the summer than in the winter when
they wear their red coats.

General Washington giving the
locals an encouraging speech.

The Colonial Capitol.

Our next adventure was at Mt. Vernon, the erstwhile home of George Washington. The plantation is pleasant, the garden is beautiful, the house is interesting, and the museum is excellent. It is well worth a trip to the northern confines of Virginia.

Mt. Vernon (and scaffolding because they were re-shingling
the roof). The building looks like it's covered in stone, but
it's really wood with a paint and sand covering deliberately
trying to look like stone.

One of the stained glass windows in the museum.

Out in Washington's garden . . .

. . . where there are some
very tall plants.

Washington's innovative 16-sided treading barn.

Doing a little work on the plantation.

Washington's pier out on the Potomac.

After our day at Mt. Vernon, we spent the night with my aunt and uncle, who kindly loaned us some beds to save us some driving time. Even better, my aunt gave us a dulcimer lesson, we had a few rousing games of Sjoelbak (Dutch shuffleboard), and we were fed a delicious Dutch breakfast of “mousies” (or “vruchten hagel”)the next morning. The half of me that is Dutch was in heaven.  And the other half of me was heartily enjoying it.

(I’m happy to brag that my first shot of Sjoelbak went straight in the four-point slot, no doubt thanks to many hours playing in Grandma and Grandpa’s basement.)

Dulcimer lesson.

This is Sjoelbak.

And this is my game face.

After our delicious Dutch breakfast, we headed to Shenandoah National Park, where we spent a good portion of the day in fog. It was beautiful fog, of course. The sun eventually came out and we were able to see the rolling green mountains. The Blue Ridge Mountains aren’t rocky and stark or red and sculpted like mountains in the west; they’re softened lumps tamed by endless trees. But still worth a visit.

Did I mention it was foggy?

Shenandoah also has black bears; and we saw several (one meandering across the way and a few cubs up in a tree – way up; they were high enough to bend the branches they were sitting on). The bears became, in fact, the main attraction for the hikers we passed along the Dark Hollow Falls trail. (I’m sure the hikers appreciated the waterfalls as well.)

There are bears in this picture.
I promise.

The first part of Dark Hollow Falls.

Tree roots made some nice steps along the trail.

Everything is bigger out west . . . except the bugs.

I love rocks.

Dark Hollow Falls

Feeling our Shenandoah hiking was insufficient, we opted to spend another day on some local trails near the shore. We first went to see the Yorktown Monument (which Jennifer had only seen at dusk before; it’s a little easier to appreciate in the daylight). Then we spent a few hours wandering York River State Park and the trails around Taskinas Creek. We ended our shoreline day with a tasty fish dinner at the Bone Fish Grill.

There is a random stand of bamboo
close to the Yorktown Monument.
It makes me happy.

Taskenas Creek, in York River State Park.

We had to hike down to all the "overlooks" on the trail.
It is a weird concept for my brain.

Fossil beach.
(I don't know if there are any fossils,
but there are lots of broken shells,
sticks to throw in the water, and
tree trunks to climb on.)

The donuts from this place
are scrumptious.

Our Sunday was spent at church, riding the ferry from Jamestown to Scotland (no, not that Scotland), and feeding turtles. We intended to feed some birds, but we didn’t think to pull out my stale Honey-Nut Cheerios for the seabirds that were following the ferry; then when we stopped at the lake, the ducks and the geese were no-shows. So the turtles got all the treats instead.

The little bit of Old Jamestown that is
visible from the ferry.

 

Mine?

Our last big adventure was Appomattox Court House. It was a good time to visit, as they have some special items on display due to the Civil War sesquicentennial. My impression coming out of Appomattox is that it is a miracle the nation survived; and the Lord put specific leaders in place so it would. What a forgiving, humble, generous, unconventional way for a civil war to end.

Robert E. Lee's copy of the Surrender Terms.

Jennifer on the back deck
of the courthouse.

Parole passes were printed here for all of
Lee's soldiers so they could go straight home.

A little bit of fall sneaking into
the end of summer.

Historical Appomattox keeps its fire
hydrants in barrels.

A big chunk of cheese in the general store.

 

As for the end of our adventure, I spent our last morning enjoying scones, crossword puzzles, and the company of a good friend.