Looking Outward and Inward

         

George Bellows: Men of the Docks,
Courtesy of the National Gallery, London, England

            Whatever the era, the traveler is always pulled between looking outward and in.

            Until recently, the printed page pulled people inward: commuters read the paper on the 8 AM from Scarsdale or people on ocean liners sat in steamer chairs and read novels.

            The latest pull inward is what Southwest’s flight attendants call “portable electronic devices,” phones, computers, tablets and game consoles.  At first these were regulated or tolerated.  But now, transportation companies cater to technology users.  Mega Bus has free wi-fi and for an allegedly small fee, Southwest and other airlines will let you surf the web at 30,000 feet. 

            Sometime soon, travelers may be pulled even more inward, if airlines allow in-flight phone calls.  After sitting behind someone on a transcontinental flight in the 1980’s, who had more credit card points than sense and had to call everyone and say nothing, I am as eager for in-flight cell calls as I am for a rectal exam.

            Sleeping and reading are the two things that most often pull me away from watching the journey.

            On a recent bus trip from Albany to eastern Long Island, after waking up from a short nap, I decided to spend more time watching the trip.  The height of a bus offers a better view of the roadside than a car.  On the way home from Long Island, I got to see a beautiful old house on Long Island.  Driving by the same place in the car, the view was obscured by a hedge.

            During the Megabus leg of the trip from Albany to Manhattan, streams, rivers and ponds along the Thruway were locked in ice.  At other times of the years, these waters are open or moving, from the current or wind.  But nothing says winter like white and cold-blue ice.

            Later, thoughts of Doctor Zhivago gave way to a moment from Larry McMurtry and The Last Picture Show.  On the north side of Interstate 80, in Bogota, New Jersey, just west of the New Jersey Turnpike interchange, I saw a faded sign, painted on the side of a large building, announcing the “Queen Anne Theater.”  The building was the right shape for a movie theater but no marquee was visible from the expressway.  The building houses a dry cleaner; perhaps this business is enriched by spirits of romance and adventure from when black and white movies were shown, instead of starched shirts are boxed up.

            The Queen Anne theater observation shows something important about looking outward.  The best view of building and sign are from the eastbound lane.  If you are going west, the roadway is so low that the sign is not visible and it’s hard to see the outline of the theater.

            The main bus entrance to Manhattan is the Lincoln Tunnel.  The highway comes over the top of the Palisades, an ancient volcanic ridge.  As the bus comes through a cut in the Palisades, travelers can see a delightful panorama of midtown Manhattan and New York Harbor.  From here, the Empire State Building looks skinny, as if it had competed in one of those events where people walk or run in stairwells to the Building’s observation deck.

            If you do not look fast enough, you miss the view as the bus spirals down and into the tunnel entrance.

            Before plunging into the tunnel this trip, I saw how Manhattan and the Harbor have remained constant in an ever-changing metropolis.

            Shipping and docks in Hoboken have been replaced by waterfront apartments.  On the West Side of Manhattan, a new generation of skyscrapers will soon join the Freedom Tower.

            At the turn of the century and in the 1940’s, the painter George Bellows and photographer Andreas Feininger captured white steam rising from steam locomotives, power plants, cargo ships and ocean liners.  Working in oils and black-and-white, Bellows and Feininger each perfectly captured the hard, sharp quality of winter light and the simple, stripped down colors in the landscape.

Midtown Manhattan, 1946 by Andreas Feininger, courtesy of
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

            Most of the things that generated the steams in Bellows’ and Feininger’s times are gone, replaced by other, more modern things. 

            If Bellows and Feininger came back to the edge of the Palisades today, they might mourn the departure of trains, cargo ships and ocean liners.  But they would be happy to see that the City remain vital - - under the same hard, sharp light they saw.

The Italian Pizza Kitchen: Washington, D.C.

You might not think that a transportation conference would inspire great food.  But thanks to the Transportation Research Board’s 2014 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, I found one of the best pizzas that I have tasted in the year to date.

My friend Bob and I needed a place to eat dinner between two meetings.  After learning a reliable Irish pub near the convention had a long waiting list, we started foraging. 

On the west side of Connecticut Avenue, a few blocks south of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, we found the Italian Pizza Kitchen.  The restaurant was well-attended but not crowded.  As the interior photograph below shows, the dining room is intimate without feeling jam packed. The furniture, paint scheme and decorations feel like Italy.

The Italian Pizza Kitchen has a wide variety of appetizers, pizza slices, pizzas, salads, Paninis, sandwiches and entries, all at reasonable prices.  The place definitely serves beer and wine and may serve mixed drinks. 

Our waitress was capable and attentive but not overbearing.  Our meals arrived quickly, which was appreciated with the deadline for the next meeting, but were cooked just right.

Bob ordered a roasted eggplant pannini and I ordered a personal pizza with sausage and green peppers as the toppings.  

Both meals were tasty and appealing.  Bob said his panini "was very tasty and I really liked the bread."  Although the personal pizza is suggested as a meal for one, its six slices and 10 inch diameter means the average eater may have a slice or two leftover.  But, that is what a doggy bag is for.

The pizza had a crust that was thicker than the Neapolitan pizza favored in the New York metropolitan area but thicker than a Chicago or Sicilian pizza. 

With this thickness, the crust was crunchy on the bottom, not soggy on the top and was light and airy in between - - like good Italian bread.  The tomato sauce nicely balanced sweet, savory and spicy.  Best of all, neither the crust nor the rest of the pizza was greasy. 

We dined at the newest of the Italian Pizza Kitchen’s two locations: 2608 Connecticut Avenue, NW.  But with the capable, welcoming staff, comfortable décor and delicious food, the place felt like it had been in business for generations, not the several years it has been open.

The Best of 2013

Here is my list of the best of 2013:

1.      My readers.  Thanks to all who follow this blog.  Thanks, too, for your comments and suggestions.  The night sounds and tastes of summer posts were inspired by your comments as is item number 2, below.

2.      Burgers lost and found.  Our reader Carol was studying the Mormon migration from Illinois to Utah.  On the trip, she had a burger in Hamilton, Illinois and decided it was the best ever; it was, she reports, “the burger of dreams.”  Since then, any burger she has had is measured against the one she had in Illinois.

My favorite burger memories, my favorite lost burgers, include the employee meals that Paul Hunting served at a Long Island restaurant and burgers at O’Malley’s in East Hampton.  

     While the restaurant where Paul cooked has changed hands and O’Malley’s is closed, Café Max in East      Hampton has an East Coast burger that measures up to the burgers of my memory.

I thank my daughter and friend Dennis for introducing me to In ‘n Out Burgers.  For under $6, you can get an excellent burger, fries that are crispy without creepy additives and a medium drink.  For $2 more, you can get a chocolate shake better than any mousse, brownie or chocolate cake.

3.      Le Mirage Restaurant.    We first discovered Le Mirage on 43^rd Street between 5^th and 6^th Avenue on a cold morning.  The coffee, breakfasts and lunches were a tonic against the wind chill factor.   

We returned to Le Mirage on a wet summer day and found its menu is also delightful during the warmer months.  The place has an incredible variety of fresh and appealing breakfast and lunch dishes.  They have omelettes, eggs on rolls, pizza, sandwiches, wraps and a buffet. 

 4.      Apple picking.  In 2013, apples were in the kitchen every day of harvest season.

Apple picking at Indian Ladder Farms,
Voorheesville, NY.   Photo courtesy of D. Holt

 We picked apples at Indian Ladder Orchards and at our friend Jack Brennan’s house.  It’s really cold, but I still taste those great apples and it reminds me of when the weather was more temperate.

A back country stream near Yosemite.  Note the shirt from Tom Smith
and how the shorts undo efforta to avoid the sun (photo courtesy of D. Greninger

5.      The Eastern Sierras.  When Dennis and I returned to the mountains, trout were caught every day.   And . . . we enjoyed much good food, scenery and history. Yosemite.  My only regret: we were fishless on lower Rush Creek, whose looks screamed “trout.”  If Dennis couldn’t find a trout, they must have all been traveling to Albany, going apple picking.  Seymour helped me acquire trip provisions and set up a pre-trip training table at Ernie Jr’s Mexican restaurant.  Pasadena Casting Club friends offered encouragement; Tom Smith provided an expedition shirt to screen out the infernal high country sun.

     We got to Yosemite, saw the effects of an ancient waterfall on igneous rock in the desert,

enjoyed the Alabama Hills Café again and discovered new deli at the intersection where the road climbs the mountains to Yosemite.

The newly redone Tioga Gas Mart and
Whoa Nellie Deli on the road to Yosemite

6.      High Hook Wineries.  One of the nicest 2013 wine moments, that’s wine moment, not whine moment, was meeting Mike Seymour and John Heus, High Hook’s proprietors.  Mike and John are congenial and capable; their wines are tasty.  I hope to enjoy more of them in 2014. 

7.      Top of the Morning Café, Utica, New York.  When a favorite restaurant closed, I needed a breakfast place.  I found Top of the Morning Café north of the Utica Thruway exit.  The place is bright, the staff welcoming and the food is great.  Readers who have stopped by liked the place.


8. Pizza: In 2013,  I got to end the year with a few slices of pizza from Prima Stella Pizzeria in Manorville, NY on eastern Long Island.  Prima Stella has a thin crust pizza that is tops among pizza in the New York metropolitan area - - maybe even the nation.

      Also in 2013, Mark's Pizza opened a new store in suburban Rochester.  Mark's Pizza has a crust that is part way between thin crust and Sicilian.  The restaurant cuts a slice that is generous in size, amount of cheese and toppings.  Plus, the staff are capable and welcoming.  There are several other Mark's in the Rochester area.  If you plan to pass through the area, look this local restaurant up and save some time to stop in!

9. American Hustle.  Okay, Okay.  I know this is being written in 2014, but . . . our last event before the ball dropped in Times Square was to see the movie American Hustle.  This movie is based, to some degree, on the ABSCAM sting that the FBI set up in the late 1970's to catch crooked politicians.

      However, I think the director and screenwriter used ABSCAM as a starting point for a movie that felt like a big, flowing novel onscreen.  Throughout the movie is a satisfying mix of drama, humor, exercise of raw power and countless plot twists.

      Perhaps most noteworthy is the high quality of the performances.  Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper and Louis C.K. do a masterful job of transforming themselves from A list celebrities into striving, conniving and often desperate hustlers from America's Garden State.  This is a must see!

If you have any favorites of 2013, please leave a comment and share them with all of us!

San Francisco Cuisine: Eat Your Heart Out

San Francisco: A Food Biography is best read on a full stomach.

If you do not follow this advice, the appealing descriptions of San Francisco cuisine and restaurants will cause you to go out and eat something, perhaps a sandwich on sourdough bread, a seafood dish or a burrito inspired by the Mission burritos made in San Francisco in the 1960’s and 70’s. 

This well-written, comprehensive and well-organized book is the second in the Big City Food Biographies Series, edited by Ken Albala and published by Rowman and Littlefield.  The first book in this series is Elizabeth Williams’ New Orleans: A Food Biography.  The publisher has just released New York: A Food Biography and has a Boston food biography in the works.

Although this book may be the first time many have heard of Erica Peters, she is well suited to write about San Francisco food.  This is her second book, her first is Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam and she is a director and cofounder of the Culinary Historians of NorthernCalifornia.

Peters is an excellent writer.  She lets the material tell the story.  She provides the narrative, sets the pace with strong structure and then lets the people she met in her research tell the story: celebrities such Mark Twain and Trader Vic or less familiar people such as Abby Fisher, an African American woman who was renowned for her southern cooking and wrote one of the first modern cookbooks in the region.

Peters has a formidable talent for organizing material.  She covers the history of food in the region from its earliest settlement up to the present day.  To do this, she immersed herself in anthropological and archaeological research, cookbooks, many hundreds of newspaper articles, biographies and histories of every aspect of the economy, society and ecology of the City on the Bay. 

San Francisco: A Food Biography has a topical format, opening with a chapter on how Bay Area climate and ecology influences cuisine.  The next two chapters explore Native American cooking and how ethnic groups in the City - - Spanish, African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Italians and others - - arrived and adapted their home cuisines. 

From here, Peters offers chapters on: food markets and retailing; famous restaurants: San Francisco cookbooks; and signature dishes, those recipes which people think of most when they think of San Francisco. 

Americans take it for granted that fresh produce appears in markets every day of the year.  Peters suggests San Francisco was one of the first places in America where people realized California agriculture could supply fresh and nutritious food year ‘round.  This realization occurred around the time of the Gold Rush in 1849 and would have been a great relief to residents and miners who had to live on bland and doughy foods.

Peters reports on her subject in a balanced manner.  For example, she discusses the racism and exclusion that nearly every ethnic group faced, when arriving with new foods.  But she also shows how the racism was overcome and local society has moved forward.

I have been lucky to visit San Francisco and eat in some of the restaurants that Peters describes.  From personal experience, her restaurant and food descriptions are exactly right.  When she describes the City’s signature dishes, it took me back to great meals in San Francisco restaurants and homes, meals enjoyed with long-time friends and family.

How Do You Like Those Apples?

On the Atlantic side of America this fall, we had a bumper crop of apples.  And in this bumper crop, one of my favorite moments was when my friend Jack Brennan invited us to pick Golden Delicious apples at his house.

            Jack and his wife, Mary, live in a corner of New York’s Capital Region that is emphatically rural - -  despite the python-like pressure of suburbs all around.         

            When we got to Jack and Mary’s house, Jack, an author and delightful story-teller, told how he became an orchardist.  “When my daughter, Mary Ann, was attending Cornell,” Jack said, “she took a course in pomology - - how to grow apples.”  “One of her class assignments,” he continued, “was to graft a Golden Delicious onto root stock.”

            Mary Ann brought home her graft of a Golden Delicious.  It was, Jack recalled, “about the length of a yardstick and the diameter of a man’s thumb.”  The Brennans planted this sapling on the east side of their house, for the sun and shelter from the area’s raw west winds.

            Despite a fragile beginning, 30 years later, the tree is over 40 feet high.  At some point along the way, Jack thought, “If one tree is good, then two must be better” and planted a companion, also a Golden Delicious.

            Over the years, the harvest waxes and wanes.  Jack and Mary eat the apples raw, feed the most blemished ones to cattle in a neighboring field and make applesauce with the rest.  With a lot of elbow grease to core and peel the apples and a recipe that his mother gave him, Jack sets up an apple sauce assembly line for a week or so in October.

            On the day we visited, the sky was one of the brightest blue of all season and the temperature was nearly perfect.  Low-hanging fruit was already applesauce in Jack’s freezer but many more apples were available from for anyone willing to climb a ladder and catch apples in a long pole cutter.

            Jack does not spray the trees.  With spots and a gray black scale on them, the apples look a bit scary.  Neither, however, hurt people - - and neither hurts the taste.

            These apples are like snow flakes in that none tastes exactly the same.  Eating the apples is also like watching the light reflect off a diamond’s facets.  One bite can be sweet, the next tart.

            Often, store-bought Golden Delicious apples are useless for baking.  They are too sweet or get mushy too soon.  Jack’s apples stayed firm, right into November.  When my wife Dorothy made the last portion of apple crisp with these apples, they had many brown spots that needed to be removed but the fruit was still firm.

            Although the weather is colder than it was when we picked apples in October, the taste of that apple crisp will remind us of the pleasant autumn senses almost to Thanksgiving.

Happy 100th LA Aqueduct! Seeing the LA Water System from the Road

         

Mammoth Mountain, on the west edge of the Owens River watershed

           While looking out the window on drives to and from the eastern Sierras, I enjoyed the vast landscape between Mammoth Lakes and Los Angeles.  The view includes Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower 48 states, lava flows, extinct volcanoes, desert and oases.

            As the drive went on, rolling by at highway speed, I started seeing glimpses of the water system that hydrates LA.

            Dennis has been driving between LA and the eastern Sierras for decades and pointed out aqueducts and reservoirs along the way.  Jane Galbraith, a public information office at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), helped me decode the water system in the landscape, as did information on the DWP website.  One of the main things I learned is that much of the system is visible from the car - - and more if you can get out and walk.

            Much of LA’s water supply is surface and well water from the several thousand square mile Owens River watershed.  The watershed’s western boundary includes: Mount Whitney; eastern Yosemite National Park and numerous Sierra peaks over 10,000 feet high.  The Inyo Mountains on the eastern boundary have a bristlecone pine that is the oldest tree in the world.  The Inyos and the Whites form the start of the basin and range country that stretches across Nevada and into Utah.

            From the Owens valley, the DWP moves water nearly 400 miles south to LA, using the Owens River and an aqueduct system.  The entire system is gravity fed, delivering water regardless of whether or not the power is on.

            Tuesday, November 5^th, is the centennial of this system, whose planning, design and construction was managed by William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant who rose from ditch tender in 1878 to superintendent of the entire system.

            Mulholland was a larger than life figure, so much so that when Roman Polanski conceived the movie Chinatown, about water skullduggery in LA, he needed two characters to encompass Mulholland.  There was Hollis Mulwray, the cerebral technocrat and brash, aggressive Noah Cross.

            Here are some of the sights from Mulholland’s wonder that you will see along the way.

            The Aqueduct:  Route 395 crosses the LA Aqueduct in several places, such as north of Haiwee Lake and south of the village of Independence.  At these locations, you can see the water rustling downstream to thirsty Angelenos.  When looking at the Aqueduct, you may reflect, as I did, that something so small is serving so many people.  Where the Aqueduct is not directly visible from the road, you can see its right of way on the hills to the west.

            The Owens River:  Parts of the Owens are a natural aqueduct moving water to LA.  With steady flow in this part of the river, great trout fishing is available almost all year round.

            Owens Lake:  When Mulholland opened the aqueduct in 1913, all the water flowing to Owens Lake went south instead.  The Lake became a liability, with wind blowing the alkali soil high into the atmosphere and violating the Clean Air Act.  To control the dust, DWP uses water releases to re-flood the lake bottom, irrigated vegetation and gravel coatings.

Grant Lake, photograph courtesy of Tom Schweich

            Reservoirs:  The water system has several large reservoirs throughout the watershed.  One of largest is Grant Lake, near Lee Vining.  Seeing the water level in this reservoir so low was unsettling.  Let’s hope for a nice snowy, rainy season to fill it up.

            Sluices and flow measuring gages:  If you are on back roads and truck trails on the slopes of the eastern Sierras, you will see small sluices, with ponds behind them and antennae.  You will also see flow measuring gages on creeks and ditches, about the size of a garbage can.  The gages, part of the water system nerve center, help DWP determine how much water there is and where it is coming from.

            Visitor’s Centers: At the InteragencyVisitor’s Center on Route 395, one mile south of the village of Lone Pine, you can get information about the Owens valley and the surrounding mountains from DWP and Federal, State and local natural resource agencies.  The MonoLake visitor’s center near Lee Vining has information about efforts to restore lake and stream levels in the Lake and its watershed.

            Seeing this complex water system in the midst of such grand nature is fascinating in its own right.  The experience is also a landscape-size example of the dance, delicate at times, lead-footed at others, that people perform with the natural world.

I'm Not Done Yet

When it comes to autumn fishing and gardening, four words, delusional in the face of the impending cold weather, define my outlook.  Those words are, “I’m not done yet.”

            The folly of these words in the garden becomes quickly apparent.  The late planted peas never got started and tomatoes, even the prolific cherry tomatoes, are wasting away.  The savior for home grown produce this week are the cool weather crops, such as kale and chard.

            With fishing, the delusion that it will last forever is easier to maintain.  The fishing right now is wonderful.  Saltwater fish like striped bass are migrating.  Some trout and salmon are on the move to spawn.  Fish in general are said to be feeding more aggressively now, to bulk up for the coming winter.

            The fall can be a great time to learn something new about fishing.  My friend Seth is getting ready to take up trout fishing from a kayak and that has started a conversation and research that has expanded to include my friends Seymour and Phil.

            During a break at a recent meeting, my co-worker, Keith, told me about his favorite fly fishing tackle: a three weight fly rod that is six and three-quarter inches long.  Keith likes this rig as it is nimble enough for fishing the small streams he likes the most; the light weight makes the fight of even the smallest fish, “feel like a tuna.”

            If you are not trying something new, there is much delight in the tried and true.  My recent fishing has been saved by an elk hair caddis pattern tyed by my friend Dennis.  It has also been saved by one of the Woolly Buggers that my friend Barbara gave me, a tough, durable and beautifully tyed fly that her cousin Steve gave her.

This brown trout took Steve's Woolly Bugger 

A California fishing trip saved by one of Dennis' flies

 






















          One caution: If you are out in the next few weeks, be prepared for cooler weather and have a back-up wardrobe in case the weather gets even cooler or wetter.  This past week, my waders sprung a leak while I was fishing Salmon Creek, a tributary to Cayuga lake in central New York.  Even with the car heater turned to “high,” driving home in wet jeans afterwards was no fun

            Angling should be good to great on waters still and flowing on all three coasts.  If you have a story you want to share, please post - - or share it and I will update this blog!

Founding Fathers Pub and Allen Town District in Buffalo: Photos courtesy of Founding Fathers Pub

            This is a perfect time to be in Buffalo, New York.  The blast furnace heat and humidity are gone and the blizzards have yet to arrive.

            We have had great weather in upstate New York and it extends as far west as Buffalo.  The city is having its share of golden afternoons, complete with red, orange and gold fall foliage.

            One of the neatest parts of Buffalo is Allen Town, the Arts District.  One of the neatest eateries in the Arts District is Founding Fathers Pub on Edward Street, near the intersection with Delaware Avenue.

            Michael Driscoll, owner of the pub, is a retired social studies teacher, who tended bar in college.  Driscoll brings his love of history, politics and geography - - and his bartender’s congeniality - - to this appealing pub in a historic building that was a livery in the nineteenth century.  Fittingly, the place opened on Election Day, 1985.

Inside, the walls are covered with historical memorabilia and flags.  It appears every President is represented with a portrait or photograph.  Driscoll explained that he gets some of the flags when he travels but many people bring in flags from far flung places, to add to the atmosphere.

       
















             Driscoll, his bartenders, waiters and waitresses are welcoming, as are the patrons.  Early in the evening, people stop for a drink or dinner.  Later on, college students come in.  Both groups seem to co-exist, smoothly, and the place is pleasantly lively.

            The menu is reasonably priced, tasty and has fun items.  Free nachos and popcorn are available.  One of the appetizers is ground chicken meatballs, made with a local brand of Buffalo sausage and coated with Buffalo chicken wing sauce.  Founding Fathers has a few pasta dishes and a delicious variety of burgers and hot and cold sandwiches.

Both menu and website talk up a fried bologna sandwich, but I am not yet adventurous enough to order it.  Daily specials are noted on blackboards in the dining room and in the bar.

            A high point at Founding Fathers is the monthly trivia game that Driscoll hosts on the first Tuesday of each month.  If you cannot attend the trivia game and are sitting at the bar, Driscoll may toss off a trivia question or two.  On a recent visit, he asked which President was born in Illinois - - and it was not Lincoln or Obama!

            For patrons who want more history, take time to walk in the neighborhood.  On the corner of Edward and Delaware is the Mansion Hotel, a full service hotel in an old mansion.  A few steps away to the east, on Franklin Street, is a pavement-busting sycamore said to be the oldest tree in Buffalo.  Around the corner and north on Delaware is the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Historic Site.  A short drive to the north is the Albright-Knox Art Museum, which was collecting and showing Picasso’s work at least a decade before the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was even formed! 

            If you can’t visit Founding Fathers Pub, or cannot return soon enough, please visit their website.  It has a cartoon of George Washington crossing a river, possibly the Niagara River, on a burger, great writing, pictures and the menu.  

Summer Night Sounds

As summer began, I asked readers about iconic summer experiences. My friend Maureen Franz, from Staten Island, replied that she enjoys, “the chirping of the crickets in late summer evenings. There's nothing like sitting on the back porch and hearing their symphony. The cicadas, crickets and chasing fireflies are among my favorite summer memories.”

The fireflies are gone, although I saw a single, elegiac firefly in the grass a week or two ago. Yet, the symphony by night insects is still going strong.

To write about sound is challenging; I may not be up to the task. As a backstop, I listed two excellent audio resources at the end of this post.

Nevertheless, here goes . . .

Crickets and katydids make most night sounds. You may also hear a frog, toad or mammal making noise in the night.

Insects may not be Beethoven, or even hip-hop stars. However, hearing the buzzing, whirring, twirring and croaking is soothing and reminds us that life is lively, even if day lilies, lightning bugs and raspberries have come and gone.

Most of what I now know about night insects, beyond my sense of wonder about night sounds, came from a recent discovery of Tom Ashbrook’s March 16, 2011 interview of John Himmelman, a naturalist who loves the night and wrote the book Cricket Radio: Tuning in the Night-Singing Insects. Although I have not yet read this book, based on the interview it sounds, sorry for the pun, like a great book.

Himmelman states “the main reasons night insects sing are to establish - - or challenge - - territories and attract mates.” He goes on to say that sound character is set by temperature; insects are cold-blooded, fertility of each insect and the reaction of insects to each other.

There might be a tendency to think that singing insects at night are found only in the eastern United States. However, in a recent e-mail, Himmelman said, “yes, there are singing insects in the West.”

Night insects are almost uniformly some of the ugliest of insects. They are not as attractive or streamlined as butterflies or lightning bugs. However, it’s not likely you will see the insects - - and there is nothing like the sounds they make.

It’s great to listen to crickets and katydids in a giant natural symphony. However, there are specific voices in the insect symphony, such as Round Tipped Cone-Heads, a kind of katydid that sounds like a live wire and Greater Angle-Wings.

The Snow Tree Cricket, or “thermometer cricket;” speeds or slows it call as nights warm or cool. Himmelman explains that if you count the number of chirps in 13 seconds and add forty to it, you get an approximate air temperature.

Carolina Ground Crickets are typically the last audible insects. A single Ground Cricket will intrepidly call out as the nights get frosty - - sometimes it finds a refuge and sings into November.

Audio resources: On March 16, 2011, on Tom Ashbrook’s program On Point, Ashbrook and Himmelman, play and identify several species of crickets and katydids. Himmelman has his own website, with the sounds of night insects. At Music of Nature, one can listen to snippets of night insects or buy mp3 downloads of night sounds.

Italian Ways: A New Book about Italians and Their Trains

Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo, by Tim Parks, W.W. Norton and Company, 264 pages, $25.95

Why is an essay on Italy, its trains and people appearing in a blog on America’s East Coast, West Coast and Great Lakes?

Trains and people are a universal interest in travel writing. You can read this book to learn more about trains and people. Or you can read it as one of the best travel books of the year: well-written and dryly witty.

The first four chapters in Italian Ways are about travel between Verona and Milan. Parks devotes two of these chapters to a commuter train and two to first class travel on one of Italy’s new high speed trains. The remaining three chapters are about trips elsewhere in Italy, including a trip to from Verona to Sicily and the heel of the Italian boot.

My favorite train writer is E.M. Frimbo, whose essays appeared in The New Yorker. In Frimbo’s stories, the writers, Rogers E.M. Whitaker and Tony Hiss, said just the right amount about the technology and people of rail travel and the communities along the tracks.

In Italian Ways, Parks shows himself to be an heir to Frimbo. He writes well about everything: trains, the railroad system and people on the trains: passengers and train crews.

Here’s a sample of his writing . . .

This hiss of metal on metal, the very slight swaying of the carriage, the feeling of being enclosed in a comfortable, well-lighted space while the world is flung by in glossy darkness outside, all this puts me in a mood to read, as if the material world had been suspended and I were entirely in the world of the mind.

Parks is an organized writer and thorough researcher. The book’s organization is helped with illustrations by David Atkins, maps with small drawings of the trains Parks rides.

You may have no idea of how Italian train travel works or where the train is taking the author. Yet Parks has a gift for giving the reader the feeling that he or she will not get lost or in trouble - - even if he does occasionally.

Parks writes truthfully and respectfully about his subjects. Some travel writers are besotted and say nothing negative about their subject. Others focus on the negatives. He clearly explains the challenges of riding Italian trains.

Train schedules and ticket machines can be mysterious and hard to understand. It is often confusing if a person must line up and buy a ticket at a window. Some rail workers are capricious or officious. Yet, he appreciates and respects Italian trains, their crews and fellow passengers. When he relates frustrating events, he writes about them honestly but not peevishly.

He shows how a person who carefully prepares can get practically anywhere in Italy without a car. He reminds people that Italian railroad engineering is beyond world class. For example, Italy constructed three challenging long tunnels under the Alps. One of these, the Sempione, was the world’s longest tunnel for many decades, until in 1979 a Japanese tunnel was finished that went a mile longer.

If you love trains, you will love Parks’ wonderful, informed writing. If you wish to write about travel, you would do well to read Parks to see how a master does it. Whether you are on the beach or reading in the fall, put Italian Ways on your to-read list!