THE PAGE TURNS

June 25, 2023July 3, 2023

Summer Road Trip: Winnemucca

Downtown Winnemucca on June 24th, photo by kajmeister.

If we had planned out the messenger relay stops between San Francisco and, say, Denver or Chicago, would we have put one in Winnemucca? It doesn’t have the feel of “oasis” or “tavern” — it barely feels like an elongated rest stop.

Winnemucca is 2.5 hours–as the Subaru cruises–from Reno, which is 2 hours from Sacramento, which is 2 hours from the Bay Area, which is our starting point. There are effectively only two ways out of California. You bomb south on I5 to Los Angeles, then either go “up” through Las Vegas and maybe the Grand Canyon, Zion, or Bryce and head up to Utah or “down” south of Death Valley, toward Flagstaff and Albuquerque.

Or, you head north and go through Donner Pass and down into the wide, wide, wide plain of Nevada, which is not even as interesting as the deserts of Arizona and the hills that bracket the central valley of California.

I suspect that no one has Winnemucca as an ultimate destination.

June 22, 2023June 22, 2023

Happy Juhannus

Author’s note: an oldie but a goodie. Happy Midsummer!

Celebrate Juhannus 2018 — Midsummer celebration, design from finncamp.org

I spent summers as a kid at a place called the Finn Camp in the woods of suburban Detroit. The summer program was swim lessons in the morning, drama rehearsals in the afternoon, saunas on the weekends, and a lot of tag played on and underneath the docks of the lake. At the end of each school year, I lived in great anticipation for the start of all this in mid June, after the solstice party called Juhannus.

Solstice celebrations, which happen between June 19 and 21, are curiously named “Midsummer” events. In the U.S., summer is tightly linked to the school year, and most children’s seasonal school year ends near the beginning of June. So, why isn’t it the Begin Summer celebration?

The summer solstice occurs when the earth’s tilt is at maximum toward the sun in your hemisphere. In the north, we’re as close to the sun as we’re going to get during the year on that day. Daylight will be the longest–maybe you’ve felt the sky lightening earlier in the morning as you get your coffee or seen the sun peeking through the kitchen window long after dinner. After tomorrow, the daylight hours will start getting shorter again. In that sense, you could say that we’re at the “mid” point; the year is all downhill from here.

June 14, 2023June 17, 2023

Flag Day; Pride Month

Note: I could not resist updating and reposting this essay from an earlier year ’cause they just won’t stop talking about B.R.

Betsy Ross was fake news. I hate to puncture your patriotic bubble over this one, but her story was entirely made up. Alternative Facts.

When I first started researching “Flag Day,” I fully expected to write about the circle of stars and the bars of stripes and was upset to be reminded – that it’s not true. Curse that biography I read about her in the second grade… say it’s not so! Wikipedia has the details, or you can track down journal articles like this one on “Betsy Ross ‘Bit of Fiction’–The Flag'” in the The American Catholic Historical Researches, 6(4), 1910, which flatly states:

The New England Historical and Genealogical 1909… settles conclusively the Betsy Ross controversy claim to be legendary and without foundation, tradition based on tales from memory. Students and teachers should do all in their power to correct or eliminate, if possible, another bit of fiction United States.
“Betsy Ross ‘Bit of Fiction’–The Flag'” in the The American Catholic Historical Researches, 6(4), 1910.

Vexillologists tell us not to be fooled by these decrepit fictions. Vexillologist should be our word for the day!

Ross, by the way, was an upholsterer who did sew, but the details of how she created the design in a response to a George Washington request in 1776 were made up by an enterprising descendant, William Canby, who wanted to hawk fake artifacts on the Internet. (Or the Internet version in 1870, which was the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.) Since her house is now treated as a historical site and a cottage industry has sprung up around her name, his ploy worked.