NYC for New Year's

Christmas afternoon we drove to Portland, spent the evening at an almost deserted Radisson, and the next morning flew nonstop to Newark, an easy flight, caught the airtrain to Penn Station, and walked the cold ten blocks or so to the Metro Apartments.  After checking in with the hotel and with the kids, we caught a gypsy cab to meet them at the White Horse Tavern.

It has not changed much in the 20 years since we were last there, or in the 50 years since I used to go there to drink 50 cent beers and eat 25 cent pickled eggs.  The gas lights, long since converted to electricity, still light the place.

After we split up, Deb and I walked around the corner to 99 Perry Street.  My apartment was one floor up, with two front windows at the left, $125 a month.

We caught a cab back to the Metro, then despite the rain and the late hour, walked the few blocks to Times Square to enjoy some of the city's ambiance.  We got soaked.

The next day, we met the kids at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with tourists from around the world and more vacationing students and their parents than you would have imagined.  Despite the packed galleries, we each found our favorite areas.  Deb was taken by the antiquities,

especially jewelry,

Maren was most interested in the arms and armor,

I found old favorites and some new.

That evening, we took in another old favorite, which has changed some since we used to go there for lunch--two mugs of ale for 50 cents, Leiderkrantz and onion on saltines.

Women have been allowed in for years now, Leiderkrantz is no longer served, and two mugs are $5--but otherwise it seems much the same: sawdust on the floor, servers carry up to eight mugs in a hand, tables are shared.

We met drinkers from Ireland, England, Australia, as well as a bass player from Brooklyn and a New Jersey bartender on vacation.

The Museum of Natural History was next on our list.  I confess to always wanting to visit but never having done so even when I lived only a few blocks away.

Lots of people, lots of fascinating dioramas (characterized as dead animal exhibits by some to-remain-nameless members of our family), lots of ethnographic displays.  I was surprised to discover fish fossils from the Green River formation near Kemmerer, where we had just been fossil digging last summer.

Friday evening we went to the Gershwin to see Wicked, a delightful upsidedown Wizard of Oz,

in which the "wicked" witch Elphaba tries to expose the injustices of the current Oz regime and the "good" witch Glinda is a ditzy sorority queen who wants to maintain the status quo and her mindless reign.

We ate at the Carnegie Deli, crammed in with a lot of other gourmands, to eat some of the best, or at least the largest, sandwiches imaginable.

Deb and I wandered the Times Square area, enjoying the crowds.  We managed to take in the test-drop of the New Year's Eve ball and tests of the confetti as well, a few pieces of which we snagged before the sweepers vacuumed them off the street.

I don't know what the day-to-day atmosphere is these days, but at this time of year, it definitely was a carnival:

mummers enticed tourists, hawkers peddled cut rate tickets, we found ourselves projected onto a giant composite TV screen.

We went to the Frick but cameras are not allowed so the only photographic record of my favorite New York museum is a shot of the snow falling across the street in Central Park.

We visited Obscura, an antiques and oddities shop on the Lower East Side that has been featured in a TV show.  Definitely some oddities: stuffed two-headed calves, antique medical equipment, quirky stuff.

We wandered Rockefeller Center, and ate at Bombay Palace under carvings of illustrations from the Kama Sutra.

We visited St. Patrick's, undergoing renovations, during a service.  Still an impressive edifice, and lovely inside as well.

We attended George Balanchine's production of The Nutcracker, a special treat for Matthew who performed in the Huntsville Ballet's production.

We got to MoMA--New York's Museum of Modern Art--when it opened, and the crowd was already waiting and got worse as the day went on--especially in front of special exhibits such as Edvard Munch's Der Schrei der Natur, on display from October 2012 to March 2013.

This is Munch's fourth version (pastel, 1895), which sold for $119,922,600 at Sotheby's on May 2, 2012, the highest price ever for a painting at auction.  Viewers crowded in, took photos, then made way for more photographers, never really looking at the painting itself.  I joined them, I confess.  Nearby, ignored by many in the crowd, was one of the lithograph versions, equally interesting, I think.

MoMA has many other fascinating works, many of which were ignored by the crowds,

Starry Night,

Water Lilies, a Picasso goat.

New Year's eve, we jointed the Circle Line sightseeing cruise of the water front, from the West 42nd Street pier, down the Hudson by Liberty Island (closed to visitors until damages from the Sandy storm surge are repaired),

up the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge, then turn around and in the dark, back to 42nd Street.

The rest of the evening was Deb's party.  Months before, she had purchased party passes to some ten venues in the Times Square area and about 8 p.m. we started to the first, Frames Lounge, an up-scale bowling alley and night club where bowlers wore coat and ties.  Food and drink was all included, and it was excellent, but we moved on.  Police had barricaded every crossing, and our spendy entry wristbands swayed no one--half the people in the crowd displayed them.  The police said the crowd was already too big, they were letting no one in at that crossing, go north a block--which we did, and heard the same story.  Finally, we slipped around a barricade, and headed east toward Seventh.  A cop stopped us, asked how we had gotten in.  I said, the cops back on Eighth had let us through.  He shrugged, and we wound up at Chevys Fresh Mex on 42nd, which we had walked by every day on our way to Times Square, a two-floor night club with too-loud music spun by a d.j.  The drinks were covered, including tequila shots, and everyone was happy and getting happier.

We gave up on the idea of fighting our way to see the ball drop--after all, we had seen the practice drop, it was cold out, and rest rooms were handy.  At about 11:55, the bartenders lined up champagne glasses--plastic, of course--along the bar, poured the bubbly, and at the sounds of the horns, we toasted another year.

And a few minutes after 12, we braved the cold two blocks back to the Metro and fell into bed.


At 11:09 the next morning we walked into the Guggenheim to see a display of some 110 black-and-white works from 1904 to 1971 of Pablo Picasso, paintings, sculpture, and works on paper.

Except in the foyer, photography was not allowed as was announced in signs throughout the museum, although many in the crowd, art lovers though they might be, clearly could not read.

We took the elevator to the top, then walked down the spiral display area, seeing Picasso's development

from representational early work to later abstractions such as The Milliner's Workshop (1926).

In the afternoon, Deb and I went down to the Village to walk around the old neighborhood

and discovered we weren't the only ones looking for nuts.

That evening, we met the kids for another great meal.  And then in the morning, we met everyone at Penn Station and Maren, Deb, and I took the airtrain back to Newark, Maren to fly to Alabama, Deb and I to Denver, then Portland and the drive back to the ranch.  A good trip.

John von Hartz at his house party he invited us to.  Thanks, John, it was great seeing you again.

I'm trying to figure out where we are at the Met.

            
                          Happy 2013!

Trippin' with Maren

Over the years, I've driven through Kemmerer, Wyoming, any number of times on my way to or from the Denver area and never stopped, but the last time we traveled that way, the visitors' center at Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado was closed due to land movement─doors askew, long cracks in the walls─so we stopped at the Fossil Butte National Monument visitors' center instead just west of Kemmerer in the Fossil Lake area of the Green River formation.  Sixty million years ago three lakes teemed with fish and plants that, upon dying, sunk to the bottom and were covered with mud in thin layers that over the millennia coalesced into shale and wound up as the top layers of buttes, now mostly owned by the state, which rents sites to entrepreneurs who in turn, for a price, let enthusiasts dig for fossils.  Deb─one such enthusiast─asked Maren if she were interested, and suddenly we had two such enthusiasts.

Maren flew out Tuesday, June 20.  We drove two days to Kemmerer and showed up at Ulrich's Fossil Gallery early one morning, boarded a four-wheel drive SUV, and climbed to the top of a nearby butte.  The shale today retains the thin layers of the ancient annual mud deposits and one hunts fossils by carefully lifting a few layers at a time using hand sledges and flat pry bars, not unlike splitting plywood, to discover what lies between the layers.

With guidance from two of Ulrich's employees, Penny Lint and Mike Snively, in bright sun and an almost cloudless sky we worked at one end of the dig.

As each layer popped free, we found here and there carbonized remains of a herring-like fish, Knightia, and fossilized fish poop; for which we were not told the scientific term (coprolite─if you're interested).

As time was running out and the heat was getting to us, we turned up a four-foot wide layer and there lay:  a 12-inch long Diplomystus.  The prize of the day.

We loaded it and our other finds in the SUV and drove the perilous track back to the gallery where Mike trimmed the slabs with a chop saw and explained how to preserve them.

We drove back to Kemmerer where we spent the rest of the day exploring.  Established in 1897, the town, population now about 2600, is home to James Cash "JC" Penney's "Mother Store"─which we did not explore─and a museum in a former LDS church, which we did explore.  Kemmerer is paired with Diamondville, population 753, which was known during prohibition as "Little Chicago" for its many stills, some of which are now in the museum, lovely large copper stills, constructed by a local smith.  Both towns have many no-longer-operating stores and houses that have seen better days along almost deserted streets.  Exploration did not take long.

Next morning we headed north to Yellowstone, stopping in Jackson for locally made organic ice cream at Moo's Gourmet Ice Cream, yum, and for the requisite tourist photos.

We had made arrangements late, so our reservations were in West Yellowstone, Montana, but on the way we of course stopped at Old Faithful, for more tourist shots.

As we drove along the Madison river, we passed a flashing sign warning of buffalo ahead, and sure enough, a herd was ambling across the road, causing a "bison jam," replacing the "bear jams" of 30 years ago.  The animals still had remnants of their winter coats.

The adults ignored the vehicles in the jam as we slowly worked through, but the calves were more curious.

The next morning we joined a park ranger for a guided 2 1/2 mile walk from Biscuit Basin to Mystic Falls.  While we waited, an Osprey hovered in the wind over the Firehole River looking for a meal.  It made several swoops, but never hit the water, so we did not see it catch a fish.

Our guide pointed out features of the hot pools at the Basin and led us on a narrow trail into the hills beyond until we ended at the Falls.

Some of the group continued up the trail for a longer circular trip back; Maren and I headed back the way we came, a shorter and easier walk, and took photos of resident marmots.

That afternoon, we walked the trail in Upper Geyser Basin past the numerous hot pools and spitting geysers to Morning Glory pool.

Tourists crowded around Old Faithful Inn and the trails nearby, reflected by the signs at the attractions lamenting vandalism.

Because items thrown in the pool restrict the flow of the 180-plus degree water, Morning Glory no longer has the pristine clarity it had just a few years ago, the water now clouded with algae that grows in lower temperatures.

By the end of the day, I had walked almost 8 miles at elevations from 6,000 to 7,000 feet, an exhausting feat; Maren had walked farther.

We headed north toward Mammoth, and found elk.

Surprisingly, the elk jams were not so extensive as the buffalo jams.

The herds look healthy, with calves still in spots, and the bull in velvet.

At Mammoth, we took Upper Terrace Drive, found parking despite the crowds, and walked out on the boardwalks overlooking the white calcium carbonate deposits.

We drove to Gardiner, Montana, for lunch and to see the Roosevelt Arch at the north entrance, which I had not seen since I was a kid driving to my summer job in the Montana woods.

Then we headed south on the east side, where, we had heard, there might be bears.  There were.  First we saw cars, pickups, RVs stopping, on the shoulders, in the road: a bear jam!  Then we saw the mother and cubs on the hill above, not 20 yards from the pavement.

A few miles farther, we ran into our second bear jam of the day, for another mother,

this time with her cub up a tree.

A few miles farther, a third jam, this time for grizzlies.  The first was about 50 yards down the slope from the road.

The second was about a thousand yards, a mere speck

until I pulled him in with my 450 mm lens.

People lined the road, vehicles stopped everywhere.  One driver stopped in the road, jumped out to see better, and left his door open, blocking the other lane─not that anyone was moving.  I could hardly blame them, these were my first grizzlies too, ever.

A classic bear jam, complete with classic 1930s roll-top yellow park tour bus.

A great trip, with only a two-day drive to home.