Back exterior of my townhouse

I chose my apartment in the Grand/Ingersoll neighborhood primarily because I work downtown. It takes me less than ten minutes to drive to my parking lot, and five minutes to walk from there to my desk. Before this I was living with my parents out on the family farm, and the commute was relatively long for this area. It was such a relief to just roll out of the apartment lot onto Grand and never have to use the freeway. I do like the neighborhood, generally speaking, and walking to shops and the grocery store along Ingersoll. I even ride my bike to work sometimes, although that can be a whole different sort of stressful commute. (The bike lanes along Ingersoll are a nice idea, but down near MLK the pavement is so cracked and rough you’re better off on the sidewalk.) I especially like the old oak trees, which are far better than the cheap, short-lived trees found in most suburban neighborhoods.

It was my dream to buy my first house with my hypothetical future wife, but after a couple years of living here with no wife in sight I decided to let go of that. Last year I was living on the ground floor of the same building I live in now. Then the rains came. Summer 2010 was monsoon season in Iowa, and I discovered the exterior wall of my bedroom was more like a semipermeable membrane. Mold started growing on it, and after some animated conversations with the apartment manager, I moved to the seventh floor. At the time I was so angry I just wanted to move out and buy a house, but I didn’t know what I wanted and was still attached to the dream above. It’s best not to make decisions involving large sums of money in the heat of the moment, right?

Wet, moldy wall and carpet. Yuck

The flooded bedroom was only the worst of a litany of woes. (I have a whole list, but I’ll spare you, dear reader. I’m keeping it so I remember what I have to be thankful for in my new abode.) I’m sure there are nicer places in the neighborhood, but I doubt there are many. Most nicer ones are probably rented condos that cost more to rent than they would to pay the monthly mortgage on. What’s my definition of nice? Well, probably newer, for one thing, or at least not musty! Look, I appreciate old houses. I grew up in one of the oldest farmhouses in Dallas County (not counting the additions made over the years). I’m also acutely aware of the drawbacks and maintenance costs, and I’m not terribly interested in home improvement. I looked at several old houses in the Beaverdale/Waterbury/South of Grand neighborhoods, and they were mostly fixer-uppers, in my opinion (or overpriced South of Grand– good grief). Also, when I see old windows of the sort I grew up with, I don’t think “charming,” so much as “poorly insulated.” Then there’s the property taxes in the City of Des Moines vs. West Des Moines. For equivalently priced properties, it was about $1,000 more a year, every year, for the privilege of living in Des Moines city limits. Even when I found something newish or extensively remodeled, this canceled out those benefits. I considered the condos at 3031 Grand which were built in 2004, but found I could get something of the same quality but substantially larger in West Des Moines for the same money. Apparently a lot of other people think that, too– I learned it would be hard to get a loan for a condo there with only 50% owner occupancy in the complex!

As for living downtown, Sherman Hill is pretty much the only realistic option for someone with my income. I’m not poor enough to qualify for rent-controlled housing, and not rich enough for anything else. I don’t want to be impoverished in my retirement to enjoy a certain lifestyle while young! $140,000 for a 1 bedroom condo? No thanks! Taxes are also very high. Even in Sherman Hill, condos (renovated or not) aren’t very affordable, considering the tiny kitchens, narrow stairs, lack of parking, and various other compromises. Even if I was very into the downtown social scene, I don’t know if I could justify the expense of living there.

3031 Grand seen from my apartment

Since I don’t want an old house, that disqualifies most of Des Moines. My snooty yuppie tendencies aside, the larger issue is that starting over from scratch is often easier than fixing something that’s worn out or broken. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and so it’s easier and cheaper to build infrastructure to modern standards than try to refurbish the old. Even if I did want an old house, a farmhouse outside the city might be worth the commute, given lower taxes and property values. A large part of those Des Moines property taxes are covering maintenance on old infrastructure, and let’s not forget the good ol’ boy public employee patronage networks and other long-entrenched special interests. Why put up with all that when there’s an alternative? One can certainly go too far in the opposite direction. Growing up, I vowed to never contribute to urban sprawl by living in places near home that I knew had recently been farm fields. It’s not like torturing kittens or anything, but it’s not very sustainable. My townhouse was built in 1984 and is east of I-35, so I consider it non-sprawl. The population keeps increasing, and people gotta live somewhere. There’s a balance to be found, or a rationalization to be made, depending on how radical your opinions on urban planning.

All in all, I’m satisfied with my decision. It’s not perfect, I suppose, but it’s a compromise that doesn’t feel too much like one. I’m excited to move!

Here’s an interesting take on the “Jobs and Religion” theme: Death of a Human Tech God? I’m sure there will be many insightful obituaries in the coming days.

In discussing the first essay, Wood comments on the problem of defining “the good” and its source:

Many people, for instance, believe that morality is a deliverance of God, and that without God there is no morality—that in a secular world “everything is permitted.” You can hear this on Fox News; it is behind the drive to have the Ten Commandments displayed in courtrooms. But philosophers like Kitcher remember what Socrates tells Euthyphro, who supposed that the good could be defined by what the gods had willed: if what the gods will is based on some other criterion of goodness, divine will isn’t what makes something good; but if goodness is simply determined by divine will there’s no way for us to assess that judgment. In other words, if you believe that God ordains morality—constitutes it through his will—you still have to decide where God gets morality from. If you are inclined to reply, “Well, God is goodness; He invents it,” you threaten to turn morality into God’s plaything, and you deprive yourself of any capacity to judge that morality.

I’m inclined to reply that way, but not quite. Socrates is suggesting there must be an objective standard of “good” that we appeal to in disputes. The opposing view is that there is no objective standard, which is probably the more popular position in Western culture today, and the one affirmed by most secularists. These people are not merely self-indulgent hedonists; it turns out the good is quite hard to define, and thousands of years of philosophizing have failed to do so conclusively. Naturally, some thinkers have decided the question “What is good?” is essentially meaningless and unintelligible. As the twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell puts it, “questions as to ‘values’ lie wholly outside the domain of knowledge.” 2 + 2 = 4 is factual and true, but “thou shalt not murder” is a matter of opinion. This is a difficult position to hold, for obvious reasons. Russell himself was a lifelong activist for pacifism and nuclear disarmament among other causes, and I believe he said something to the effect that his distaste for broccoli was different from his distaste for torture. Despite feeling that torture was truly bad and acting on that feeling as if it were true, in the end his philosophy compelled him to hold they were both just tastes: there was no logical reason to prefer one or the other. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong; I’m not a Russell expert.)

Like Russell, most people who say morality is relative can’t really bring themselves to act as if it were, and it’s not just because they would go to jail. It doesn’t take much insight to come to the conclusion that wantonly killing people is wrong, and most people, most of the time have reached it. Even murderers will give an excuse like “she was having sex with another man, so she deserved death.” It’s not really murder, because it was actually justice.

In the second of a series of lectures later published as The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis argues these basic moral precepts form the “tao” or moral law that is as axiomatic to ethics as a – 0 = a is to mathematics. There’s no way to prove “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” it must be accepted as a given.

There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

None of this requires belief in a deity or even a supernatural reality, but I think natural law tends to lead to it. The problem is that these rules shade into each other and it’s difficult to determine which is the best choice: torture a few terrorists in order to prevent the possibility of the deaths of many innocents, etc. etc. Moral choices do not have the clean precision of logic about them, but people nonetheless weigh the options against a standard. The perfect choice is perhaps unknowable to finite, mortal beings, but a perfectly good deity can been seen as the source and the intersection of goodness. Then again, faced with the difficulty of making moral choices, many people defer to some authority: maybe a pastor who claims to speak for God, or a celebrity who seems like one.

***

I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. — Ecclesiastes 1:14

Wood’s excerpt from “The Lighthouse” is a good example of the other general problem facing those proclaiming secularism as an affirming outlook on life: meaninglessness. Though of course I haven’t read the whole essay, I don’t see what’s so “acutely intelligent” about Robbins’s piece he praises. Robbins seems to think devoting one’s life to a finite cause will provide meaning enough for anyone. Here’s what Russell, a Nobel laureate who avidly pursued many causes in his long life, has to say:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. — “A Free Man’s Worship”

Gee, have fun with that. Russell’s proposed solution seems to derive from that of another other famous pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer, who said that our lives are dominated by will, i.e. base, selfish instincts that can never be fully satisfied, and the best we can hope for is to struggle with limited success against them and try to be sympathetic to others engaged in the same struggle. David Foster Wallace said something similar, but without the grandiloquent pessimism or theorizing:

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. — Commencement Address to the Kenyon College class of 2005

Of course, he denied he was giving moral advice. His suicide three years later makes the address more poignant. Does it mean this task is impossible, or was just impossible for him? Earlier he says

…an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

Lack of an ultimate meaning becomes pretty hard to live with. I’ve never read “To the Lighthouse,” but it reminded me of Woolf’s better-known essay “The Death of the Moth,” a memento mori in prose. It concludes, “Oh yes, [the moth] seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.” Her suicide note has the same sense of resignation. Her husband gave her “the greatest possible happiness” but it wasn’t enough to overcome her depression. Thinking of all this, I remembered her words to her sister concerning her fellow British literary modernist, T. S. Eliot:

I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God. — letter to Vanessa Bell, February 11, 1928

Oh, the irony, right? Eliot would go on to write Four Quartets, a ruminative series of poems focusing on life and man’s relationship to the divine despite our broken, time-bound lives. (That’s as good of a one-line summary as I can manage.) “Fare forward,” he writes, despite having had his share of disappointments in life. He concludes the poems with Julian of Norwich’s famous line:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

I know not everyone who has a secular or even explicitly negative outlook on life leaves the world in despair or suicide, and that some get away with murder while the innocent are condemned. Virginia Woolf was sexually abused by her stepbrothers and likely would’ve struggled with depression her whole life, whatever her spiritual beliefs. Yet as DFW suggests above, I think the odds of a happy ending are better if you believe in an ultimate, transcendent truth. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes may call everything in the world meaningless, but he also believes “everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.” A crucial difference.

These are simply the sort of things that come to mind when I read a piece like Wood’s, and I think it shows how my own outlook has been shaped by the things I’ve read.  I’m probably wrong about some things here, but someone being wrong on the internet is nothing new.

“…and we had to sit there, on the runway, for forty minutes!”

“Oh really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero? It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should be constantly going OHMYGOD! WOW! You’re sitting in a chair… in the sky.“

The New Caledonian Crow is smart enough to use three tools in succession to obtain food. They also know how to make hooks to fish grubs out of trees. No other animal, not even the chimpanzee, is more effective at using tools.

It’s been about a month since we left for Haiti, and it’s taken me this long to sort out my thoughts. Even now I don’t have a polished, unified story to tell, more a series of thoughts and observations: Pensées d’Haiti.

When Americans think of Haiti (which isn’t often) two things come to mind: poverty and voodoo. I can verify that indeed, these exist in Haiti. Of voodoo I have little to say, other than there was a temple near the church we were building, and I think its “darkness” is exaggerated. It’s just another false religion. The level of poverty is severe and certainly the worst I’ve seen (not that I’ve seen much) yet it’s not as bad as you might think. Let me try to explain.

Port-au-Prince from the mountain above the city

Port-au-Prince is impressive in the sheer scale of its jumbled dereliction. Every day we drove a more or less North-South route across the city. In this city of 3 million, few buildings are more than three or four stories high, maybe because most of the taller buildings collapsed. Other than a few landmarks such as a large roundabout and a bridge across a dry riverbed, the street-side view was a regular stream of half-finished buildings and walls topped with razor wire separated from the road by narrow sidewalks where people sold all sorts of goods. I mean all sorts: tires, clothes, live animals, cell phones, fruit, little one-cent bags of water— anything the average Haitian would need. The people were probably better dressed than the average American and would look out of place in Walmart. Many of them were also carrying much more than the average American would. We saw women toting 42-pound barrels of water on their heads. One woman even had a tub of live turkeys. I hardly saw anyone I would describe as overweight. Haiti is full of strong contrasts, and one of the more surprising was between all the purposeful and well put together-looking people, the children in their spotless school uniforms, and the garbage and debris that was scattered everywhere. Dumpsters were placed at intervals beside the main road— and I do mean beside the roads, blocking the whole sidewalk, as if they’d been accidentally left there. Most were overflowing, and some were on fire. We saw one that had been hit by a vehicle and overturned, and rather than righting it, another was set beside it. Since garbage collection is spotty many people just throw their trash into the street, and when enough of it piles up and the pigs and goats have gotten all the goodies out, they burn it. The city smells of burning garbage and diesel exhaust.

Burning garbage, Haitian style

It was hard to miss the election graffiti and posters that were plastered all over. Rather than put up one big poster, supporters instead put up row upon row of A4-size sheets until the whole wall was covered. Many walls along the main roads were simply spray-painted with “Votez Martelly #8″ (Martelly was the eventually winner) and the names of other candidates. Incredibly, Martelly was spelled at least three different ways. Wouldn’t you know how to spell the name of your candidate? Most likely, the taggers were paid by supporters of the candidate and not exactly supporters themselves. We also saw “Preval + Jude = kolera” fairly often along Route Delmas. (Preval is the outgoing president, and Jude [Celestin] was his party’s candidate.)

Driving in Port-au-Prince takes special skill. It’s hard for an American to appreciate, but our driving customs are quite orderly in comparison. Imagine you’re driving down a narrow four-lane road like Grand Avenue in Des Moines, but it’s largest, widest road in the city. It’s 6 am but the traffic is almost bumper-to-bumper, since everyone gets up when the sun rises and it’s unsafe to be out after dark. There’s a curb down the middle of the road to keep people from just driving everywhere, so if you need to turn your have to do it at an intersection, which probably doesn’t have a light or turning lanes. Fortunately, with so many people on the road no one goes very fast, and you just kind of push and flow through the intersections, with a lot of honking so everyone knows you exist and you’re going this way, by golly. Motorcycles will pass you on both sides even when there’s practically no room to do so, but they’ll probably honk before they do it so you at least see them coming. Driving takes real skill and ideally a 4×4 with off-road tires, because only the main roads are paved. People walk along the narrow sidewalks right beside the road and right between cars when they want to cross.

Many people travel in tap-taps, which are brightly colored private taxis and buses that people tap coins against when they want a ride. Many are decorated with Bible verses and the larger ones often feature portraits of saints and black celebrities. One might have Saint Peter on the back, the next, Snoop Dogg. (Yes, we did spot a Snoop Dogg tap-tap.) They frequently have music blaring as well, and they reminded me of birds displaying for mates. I assume the gaudiness of the tap-taps evolved along similar lines as the peacock’s tail.

The Snoop-Dogg tap-tap

When charities solicit donations for the poor in places like Haiti, they often show despondent, dirty people in filthy slums, or starving children with flies around their eyes— people in need of immediate relief. In reality, such utter destitution is uncommon. Most people, even in earthquake-devastated Port-au-Prince, are capable of supporting themselves in some manner. As we traveled across the city, it was clear that most people were simply going about their business. Some of them were even smiling and laughing, like they were happy or something! For us it was our big Haiti Mission Trip week, but for them it was just another week. Scores of people sold a wide variety of goods on the street— tires, clothes, cell phones, fruit, little one-cent bags of water— anything the average Haitian would need. Some had whole buildings, others only a few baskets, but they were doing the best they could to make a little money. While only 20% of Haitians are officially employed, that doesn’t count these little sole proprietorships. Hundreds of thousands of people are still living in tents, and yet many of those same people have some source of income, clean clothes, cell phones…. Even before the earthquake, housing seems to have been costly, and now because of the high demand for building materials it’s even harder for the average Haitian to afford. Cement is the primary component of most buildings in Haiti. The cement we poured for the church foundation cost $155/yd and went up to $185/yd when we were leaving, which is three to four times as much as it would cost in the U.S. Many people are also afraid to return to living inside cement buildings because of the earthquake, so you can see why so many continue to live in tents. I wonder what is being done to alleviate housing costs and I’d think some sort of 2:1 matching program where the charity contributes $2 toward housing for every $1 the Haitian person saves could go a long way. Unfortunately, it’s hard for most Haitians to save money since banks aren’t widespread. A city of 3 million probably has some financial institutions, but not many will want to bother with people who can only put away a few dollars at a time. (This is why microfinance is an important innovation.) When you consider the minimum wage is $3 a day and and a good wage is $5 a day, you can see why microfinance would be a useful tool for alleviating poverty in Haiti. It’s hard to buy lunch in the U.S. for less than $5.

Stay tuned, there’s more to come. In a few days I’ll write more about the work we did and the people we met.

Sufjan channels Kanye West during Impossible Soul

Sufjan interspersed the avant-garde work with acoustic guitar songs, most of which I didn’t recognize, for “a little palate cleansing,” he explained. He opened with an electronica-infused version of “Seven Swans” which fit well with his new work, and closed with a new version of “Chicago” (of course). For an encore he played the Illinois UFO song on the piano, followed by “John Wayne Gacy,” both of which were terrific. It was a bit strange to hear the crowd singing along to lyrics like “He dressed up like a clown for them… quiet hands, quiet kiss…” Ahh, the creepiness felt new all over again!

I really appreciated his humility in explaining his creative process and struggles with the new album, which you can read in interviews if you’re interested. He was very apologetic when, in one of the acoustic intermezzos, he forgot some of the lyrics. I wasn’t bothered at all, probably because I didn’t know the song. With a lot of performers, I feel the show is entirely an act, a style they simply adopted at some point in their career because it filled the room, and they go home and are completely different. Sufjan is quite goofy, but even when he’s autotuning his voice, still seems authentic.

As much as I enjoyed the show, I doubt I’ll listen to The Age of Adz much on my own. The live visuals add so much to what is otherwise a very strange, sonic odyssey. As I listen to it now in the comfort of my living room, I feel as though I’ve brought home a Picasso and hung it on the wall. I appreciate it in an art museum, but not in my home, where it just doesn’t match the furniture. The concert is the complete experience, the album is just a reproduction. That may be a trite thing to say, but in this case it’s very true.

Some reviews of The Age of Adz

One such passage is in Luke chapter 19, where the tax collector Zacchaeus encounters Jesus.

1 Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through.2 A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy.3 He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd.4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.5 When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.”6 So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.7 All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”8 But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”9 Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Earlier, as Jesus was approaching Jericho, he healed a blind man outside the city who heard the crowd rushing past. This is significant for what occurs later with Zacchaeus, because it shows the people had gone out to meet Jesus as a honored guest to the city. In the Middle East, important guests are welcomed outside the city walls. The more important and honorable the guest, the father out the people come to meet him. Thus when 19:1 states Jesus was passing through, it’s possible the people were miffed that he apparently wasn’t staying overnight.

Though Zacchaeus is wealthy, he has no respect or standing in the community because he is a tax collector. Ordinarily a wealthy citizen would have been able to move to the front of the crowd, but Zacchaeus is one of the worst people in the world, in the eyes of a first-century Jew. Tax collectors were parasites, thieves, oppressors, collaborators, utterly unclean and dishonest. In modern terms, he would be like a combination of IRS agent, spy for North Korea, and sex offender. It would be dangerous for him to even enter the crowd, as someone could easily kill him without fear of being caught.

Zacchaeus runs ahead and climbs a tree. Adults in the Middle East don’t run; it’s undignified. They certainly don’t climb trees. As a outcast he has no dignity anyway, so he might as well. It’s possible he also climbed the tree in order to avoid being seen by the crowd, which was now outside the city walls. Instead of inviting himself to Zacchaeus’s house, Jesus was expected to excoriate him, perhaps tell him to leave his evil occupation, make restitution and copious sin offerings in the temple. Instead of doing what the crowd wants, Jesus honors him with his offer. The people, who already thought Jesus wasn’t going to do them the honor of staying overnight, are shocked and angry: “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.” This isn’t bringing honor to the community in any traditional sense. Jesus has taken the dishonor and opprobrium assigned to Zacchaeus upon himself, and in so doing brought Zacchaeus to repentance and salvation. It’s costly grace, a preview of the Cross.

Politically, Jesus has brought freedom to the oppressed (the people of Jericho) by also bringing freedom to the oppressor (Zacchaeus). The pursuit of justice in the name of Jesus, whether or not it’s labeled “social,” often seems to devolve into a class warfare mentality. We pray for God to help us defeat the oppressors, maybe even to “destroy the wicked,” as some of the Psalms say. As followers of Christ, we should remember sin oppresses us all, and it’s Christ’s deliverance from sin which ultimately saves. It’s easy to be cynical about the rich and powerful, thinking they’ll never listen, they’ll never change, but cynicism is cheap. Grace is free, but costly.

That Saturday I began a long, circuitous journey southward to Cape May, where I crossed the Delaware Bay on the ferry to Lewes. I missed my 8:55 am bus in Princeton. I crossed the campus and stopped by the first bus I saw, which turned out to be headed to New York, and by the that time the one to Trenton had left.  Since I didn’t know when the next one would come, I sat at the bus stop for over an hour. After visiting one of the nicest parts of New Jersey, I saw some of the not-so-nice parts. The light rail system between Trenton and Camden was nice and reminded me of Europe. Regarding the buses, I have a question: who decided bus seat upholstery must have such hideous patterns? Why are they always black with neon blobs or streaks? Can’t we just have gray? The towns along the Jersey shore showed me how much I took for granted in Rehoboth Beach. Except for Cape May, they all had a seedy quality to them. Atlantic City had a plastic and cardboard feel to it– the Las Vegas of the east. The ferry ride was pleasant, “a break from the ordinary,” as the ferry company would say. There was a wedding on the boat, which seemed like a neat idea.

The last time I was in Rehoboth Beach was four years ago, after my grandfather’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery (he was a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force). At that time, the city was completing renovations to Rehoboth Avenue, the main street. After a few bad storms the boardwalk was redone for the umpteenth time, but this time they left dunes between the boardwalk and beach, with dune grass planted to prevent erosion.

AH at the beach

The last storm swept away half of the dunes anyway, and the beach was uneven. The beach wants to erode and drift northward as it has further north along Cape Henlopen. The cape is growing and pointing into the Delaware Bay with sand from the eastern shore. The old Cape Henlopen lighthouse, built in 1767, ended up far south of the tip of the cape and collapsed in 1926 after a storm eroded the last grains of sand holding it up. I visited the maritime museum in Lewes, which had bits and pieces of it. Remember the gospel warning about building on sand? Well, everything around Rehoboth is built on sand! Despite the the erosion, Rehoboth still is a pleasant town, due to thoughtful ordinances and zoning in recent times. It was founded as a Methodist seaside camp, and while it quickly became a resort town, that conservative Christian foundation influenced its development, and is probably why it’s not like the Jersey shore towns I saw. There’s some sprawl along Highway 1, but the ocean thankfully limits development options. My Aunt Helen lives in a modest beach house in the old part of town. She has window air conditioners in the bedrooms, but doesn’t use it herself. She washes her dishes by hand and dries her laundry on a clothes line. The house is decorated with family heirlooms and hand-me-downs, and the phone for the land line is even a rotary! This has always been the case, ever since they bought the place in the mid 90′s. Aunt Helen was vintage before it was hip. One of her neighbors was an old man who’d been a longtime resident of the town, and had been a lifeguard on the beach in his youth. After he died at the age of 104, a gay couple bought the place (a small Sears house) and enlarged it. The house on the other side is rented but owned by two lesbians, so we joke that Aunt Helen lives in the “gayborhood”– the upper-class yuppie liberal neighborhood, at least. It seems like most of the houses have been extensively renovated, and there’s usually a German-make car in the drive. Whatever happens to rest of the neighborhood, within Aunt Helen’s house the times are not a-changin’.

My Uncle Michael and Aunt Connie came down for an afternoon with my cousin Michael Chad, his wife Amy, and their two boys, Michael and Zachary (ages 5 and 3). We went to a playground a few blocks away, and while I was with Zachary another boy came up and began telling me about his sunglasses, which he alternately described as X-ray glasses and 2-D glasses. He could see bones like they were on paper! I guess he thought I was the playground monitor. After lunch we walked to Funland, the boardwalk amusement park. It’s hardly changed in twenty years. Most of the rides are the same, and the smell of greased metal and buttered popcorn is ubiquitous. It’s amazing to think that twenty years ago my brother and I were riding those same rides, the cars and motorcycles with the honking horns, the little airships with buzzing guns. Before long they’ll move on to the teacups (my favorite) and then the haunted house and the Spinning Barf Spaceship. My camera battery was low and I’m annoyed I didn’t take any pictures then. I later got it charged at the camera shop, but by then the boys had gone home. I did get some good night shots later. Another highlight was the Discoversea Shipwreck Museum in Fenwick Island. For a $3 donation you can see a wide variety of goods recovered from shipwrecks along the Delaware coast, and some famous Florida wrecks like Atocha, all collected by the owner, Dale Clifton Jr., and most personally collected from the ocean floor. He even has a treasure chest he found near Cape Henlopen using a map and encoded book he happened to discover in an antique bookstore in Lewes. It seems hard to believe, but it looked convincing. Apparently the map indicated several other chests, but they were described as “next to the old oak tree” or other features that don’t exist now. Definitely worth a visit.

The morning before we left, I biked down to the beach to see the sun rise. I’m usually not a big fan of sunrise-over-the-ocean photos, but the woman in the foreground made these more interesting.