MESA VERDE, COLORADO: Home of the Ancient Cliff Dwellers

Caroline and her brothers at Spruce Tree House, Mesa Verde, 1958

When I was fourteen years old, my family went on an extended summer camping trip from our home in Minnesota to southern California.  One of the highlights along the way was a visit to Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado.  At that time, the campground was on top of the mesa, just a stone’s throw away from the visitor center and the ruins of Spruce Tree House.  My brothers and I spent hours climbing the ladders and exploring the ruins.  Inside the visitor center I loved peering at the dioramas with their tiny houses and people, and reading about the pottery, tools, and other items in the exhibit cases, trying to imagine what life was like when the Ancestral Puebloans had inhabited these mesas and canyons.  In the evening, our family cooked our meal and ate it around the campfire, much as the Ancestral Puebloans must have done more than a thousand years ago.

Native Americans known as the Ancestral Puebloans [formerly called the Anasazi] lived at Mesa Verde between A.D. 550 and 1300. They left at a time when there was a long drought and never returned.  Their descendants are among the Native American people who live in the southwest today.

Diorama of Spruce Tree House, which was inhabited 1100 - 1300 A.D.  The dioramas at Mesa Verde were constructed in the 1930's by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

When I returned to Mesa Verde in 1990 with Richard Hewett to do the research and photography for our book, The Ancient Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde, I found the park just as fascinating as I had as a child.  The campground had been converted to a picnic area and as we ate our lunches there it brought back memories of my childhood visit.  Since then, many more ancient sites within the park had been discovered and excavated, and new research was offering new evidence to explain why the Ancestral Puebloans had abandoned their cliffside dwellings so suddenly.

One of my favorite parts of the park was a small garden plot near the visitor center where the park rangers were growing corn, squash, and beans, just as the Ancestral Puebloans had in prehistoric times.  I have always been fond of bean soup and I was delighted to discover in one of the gift shops a package of red beans with a recipe on the back for Anasazi bean soup.  The recipe is below.  Although I doubt that the Ancestral Puebloans used ham hocks or lemon in their recipes, I can imagine that they might have put a chunk of deer meat and locally gathered flavorings into their beans as they cooked them over the fire.  In any case, as you eat this delicious soup, you can imagine that you are high on a Colorado mesa, gazing across the plain below.

Anasazi Bean Soup

1 package of red, pinto type, beans
2 quarts of water
1-2 ham hocks
Salt and pepper to taste
1 16 ounce can of tomatoes
1 large onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1-1 ½ teaspoons chili powder
Juice of ½ lemon

Soak beans overnight.  Drain beans.  Add water, ham, salt and pepper.  Cook until beans are tender.  Add tomatoes, onion, garlic and chili powder and cook another half hour.  Add lemon juice before serving.  Enjoy!

The high elevation of Mesa Verde, which is about seven thousand feet above sea level, makes it slightly cooler in summer and wetter than the plain below.  Both the climate and rich soil made it a good place to grow crops.  Beans were added to the Anasazi diet during the period about A.D. 550-750, and were an important source of protein.  Anasazi beans were very much like today’s pinto beans.  The Anasazi ate them fresh and also dried them to be used later. [Page 25, The Ancient Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde by Caroline Arnold (Clarion Books, 1992)] Note: the term Ancestral Puebloan replaced Anasazi after my book was published.

Visit Mesa Verde: The National Park Service website for Mesa Verde has everything you need to know to plan a visit to the park including directions, maps, things to do, and links to information about camping and lodging.  There are also pages with downloadable activities for kids and for teachers.

Oxfordshire: A Weekend in the English Countryside, Fall 1998

Oxfordshire, Sheep Grazing

(Excerpt from the London Diaries, September 1998)

 A Taste of Fall
    The weather has changed to more fall-like temperatures and there is a nip in the air.  Every day is a mixture of overcast, sun, clouds, rain, and wind as weather systems sweep down from the north.  One difference between England and California is the skies—here they constantly change.  It is no wonder that artists like Turner and Constable were so fascinated by them.  In our outings we were lucky to be outside during the nice times and inside when it turned nasty.  One thing about changeable weather, it never lasts long.

A Weekend in Oxfordshire

Thames River, near Reading

On Friday evening we took the train to Reading, which is about a half hour west of London, to spend the weekend with friends. Their home, an 18th century stone warehouse converted into a large house, has a beautiful garden with a fountain in back and overlooks the Thames in the front.  At that point the river is perhaps thirty yards across and meanders under willows on one side and along a sheep pasture on the other.  We watched swans and ducks, fishermen, and passing canal boats, which you can rent by the week for a leisurely trip along the river.

Giant White Horses

Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire

Our morning excursion on Saturday was to see the Uffington White Horse.  This is a giant drawing of a horse (about 40 feet long) carved into the top of a hillside.  According to the sign, it is 3000 years old and was probably carved at the same time Neolithic people built a fort on the top of a nearby hill.  (All you can see of the fort now are the ditches around it, but the view of the countryside from there is terrific.) The chalk downlands are a geologic feature of southern England and are characterized by rolling hills covered with short grass and tiny, almost alpine-like, flowers.  The downlands are used mostly for grazing and apparently people raise racehorses in this region. Just under the soil, is the soft, chalk stone.  The grass and dirt were removed to make the drawing of the horse.  
    The outline of the horse is white, but it is surrounded by green grass, which makes it easy to see from a long way away.  The one thing that puzzled us, though, is that you can’t see the whole horse at once except from the air.  We decided that the neolithic creators of the horse must have known that airplanes would be invented sometime in the future.  I had never heard of these giant chalk figures before, but apparently there are quite a few of them in this part of England. I picked up a piece of the chalk rock and tried writing with it on another stone and it worked almost as well as the blackboard variety.

Churchill’s Home

Blenheim Palace, Birthplace of Winston Churchill

In the afternoon, we visited Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, the home of the Duke of Marlborough and the birthplace of Winston Churchill.  Blenheim is a grand country house and surrounded by 2000 acres of beautiful gardens and lakes, most of which were designed by a renowned 18th landscape architect named Capability Brown.  This was back in the days when, if there wasn’t a lake where you needed one, you simply dug out the landscape and filled it with water to create one.  Or, if you wanted your hedge to look like a bird, you simply sculpted it that way.

Topiary Bird, Blenheim Palace

While we were at Blenheim, the ever changeable weather changed, and it started to rain, so we headed home for a nice cup of tea.
Note: We returned to Oxfordshire a month later to visit the town and university of Oxford, which will be covered in another post.

Hay drying in a field, Oxfordshire

Japantown, San Francisco

Paper lanterns at Soko Hardware, Japantown, San Francisco

When most people think of tourist destinations in San Francisco, they think of Chinatown.  But, just as interesting and not so crowded with tourists is Japantown, on Post Street, between Laguna and Fillmore.  During the Christmas holidays we made a family expedition into San Francisco and stopped for lunch and a look around in Japantown.  Highlights included browsing in Soko Hardware store, which carries everything from lightbulbs and garden supplies to pottery and paper lanterns; posing in front of the Tori Gate on the Buchanan Mall and the Peace Pagoda in the plaza across the street; shopping for trinkets at Daiso, the huge Japanese equivalent of a 99 cent store (one of our purchases was a pair of socks with five toes); and lunch at the upstairs Iroha restaurant, where we had sushi and huge bowls of udon noodles.

Sushi and udon noodles at Iroha Restaurant

Before World War II, this area of San Francisco was a thriving Japanese community, but during the war many residents were forced to leave and go to internment camps.  Although some returned, today this area is mostly for tourists, but with an amazing array of shops and businesses carrying Japanese goods.  We purchased some beautiful handmade Japanese paper, some ceramic bowls, and souvenir chopsticks for the kids. It was fun to window shop and see on display lovely silk fabrics, welcome kitties, all sorts of origami, and more.  Many of the shops and restaurants are in Kintetsu Mall and Miyako Mall, which flank the Peace Plaza.  The Miyako Mall is also the location of the Japanese American Historical Society and has photos and information about the World War II detention camps. 

Origami decorations were everywhere

We did a self-guided tour of Japantown using a card from City Walks San Francisco: 50 Adventures on Foot, published by Chronicle Books.  Each card in the set is a miniature guidebook, with a map on one side and notes about places to visit on the other. In my opinion, the “deck” of cards is a brilliant concept.  I don’t know how many times as a tourist I have struggled with  unwieldy maps (when I only needed to use one small section) and bulky guidebooks, in which I was always losing the appropriate page and had more information than I needed at the time.  The City Walks cards (about 4" by 6"), printed on heavy cardstock, fit easily into your purse or pocket and are easy to consult as you walk along.

After our lunch in Japantown, we headed for the San Francisco Opera House, about ten minutes away (by car) for an afternoon performance of the Nutcracker by the San Francisco Ballet.  Altogether, it was a very successful day in the city!

Getting there: San Francisco is a city with excellent public transportation and Japantown can be reached by buses #2, 3, 4, or 22.  However, we went by car.  Unlike some parts of the city, where parking is a challenge, we had no trouble finding parking along Post Street.  There is also a parking garage adjacent to the malls.

London's Toynbee Hall: The First Settlement House

Toynbee Hall is in London's East End

In the summer and fall of 1998, during our three month stay in London, I paid a visit to Toynbee Hall, founded in 1884.  I wanted to get  more insight into the beginnings of the settlement house movement in England and also how it evolved--or in fact, didn't evolve--in the same way as it did in the United States.  The visit was inspired by the research I did for my book, Children of the Settlement Houses, and my own background growing up in a settlement house in Minneapolis.  (Until I was ten, my family lived at the Northeast Neighborhood House, now East Side Neighborhood Services, which my father directed.  Go to at my website  and to my Dec 14 Art and Books blog for more about my life growing up at Northeast Neighborhood House.)

Social reformers Samuel and Henrietta Barnett founded Toynbee Hall

Much of Toynbee Hall was bombed during WWII, but the main building that has the dining room and main meeting room remains almost unchanged.  I was surprised to find out that the main focus, even into the 1980's, was still residential--that college and post college students from Oxford and Cambridge would live in Toynbee Hall and the idea was that somehow this meeting of the classes in the neighborhood would result in the enlightening of the poor.  I somewhat overstate the case, because there are some ongoing programs for children and the elderly at Toynbee Hall, but it doesn't seem to have the vibrancy of U.S. settlements, which as far as I can tell have changed a lot in the last hundred years to meet the needs of the time.  Part of the stodginess of Toynbee Hall, I'm told, is because of the huge cutbacks in funding for social programs during the Thatcher years.  Many social service agencies in Britain have still not recovered.  In any case, it was fascinating for me to see the roots of the settlement house movement.  You might say that if it hadn't been for Toynbee Hall my parents might never have met and I wouldn't be here today.  (My parents were social workers and met in Chicago in the 1930's.  They lived and worked at Association House as they were training for their careers in settlement house work.)

Settlement houses still exist today, mostly in large cities, and are community centers offering a wide range of social services ranging from day care and food banks to sports and recreational programs, services for seniors, and more.  A famous early settlement house in the United States is Hull House, founded by Jane Addams in Chicago.  I visited Hull House, now a museum, earlier in the same summer that I visited Toynbee Hall.  The neighborhood that Hull House originally served was torn down for urban renewal, but the original building is maintained by the University of Illinois.  Settlements have evolved as the needs of the people in the neighborhoods around them have changed.  Some have closed their doors but many continue to serve the people in their surrounding communities. Sadly, the Jane Addams Hull Association, which had served people in Chicago for 122 years, closed its doors on January 27, 2012, a victim of the economic downturn and inability to fund its programs.

In 1884 when Toynbee Hall was founded, the neighborhood around the settlement, which is in London’s East End, was largely Jewish and eastern European , but now it is almost totally Bengali.  As you walk down the main shopping street you see shops filled with strange vegetables, exotic spices and beautiful saris.   The neighborhood is also famous for its restaurants and on the day of my visit I had a delicious and inexpensive curry lunch at one of them.

London Museums

Natural History Museum, London

Museum of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum of Childhood, Royal Academy of Art:  Here are notes of some of my museum visits from my diary of our three month stay in London in the fall of 1998.  London is packed with museums, so this is just a sampling! Click on the links for current information about museum hours, locations, etc.

Museum of London
    My other excursions last week included a trip to see the Museum of London, which traces the history of the city from 50,000 years ago.  (I didn’t realize that until the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, Britain wasn’t an island and people simply walked across from Europe.)  I have never been able to keep the kings and queens of English history straight, but this museum does a good job of making it clear when and why ruling families changed.  I didn’t allow enough time so I’ll have to go back to find out what happened after Henry VIII.

    (A few weeks later.) On Saturday afternoon we decided to visit the Museum of London.  The museum is so packed with information that one can easily go there again and again.  One of the items that caught my attention this time was the story of building the wall around London when it was the Roman city of Londinium.  The stones for the wall came from a quarry near the mouth of the Thames and were transported by boat up the river to the city.  We know this because one of the boats sank with its load of stones and was preserved in the mud of the river.  Wedged into a hole in the side of the boat archeologists also found a pair or men’s leather underwear.  Apparently some Roman sailor had tried, in vain, to use his clothing to stop a leak in this ultimately unseaworthy vessel.   

St. Paul’s Cathedral
    After tea in the museum café we visited St. Paul’s Cathedral. Unlike most other English cathedrals, which are medieval, St. Paul’s is baroque, built after the earlier medieval cathedral was destroyed in the great London fire. It is topped by an enormous dome which is one of London’s most impressive landmarks.  We decided to stay for the 5:00 Evensong, a sung service performed by the priests and the St. Paul’s Cathedral choir.  This is a boys’ choir with the soprano parts sung by little boys, who looked as young as seven or eight, and were positively cherubic in their long robes and high, fluted collars. I had been eager to hear one of the Anglican cathedral choirs after watching the Masterpiece Theater series, “The Choir” (based on a novel by Joanna Trollop), on television last year.  The boys’ voices are so pure and clear and they just soared in the huge space of the cathedral.

National Portrait Gallery
    Last Monday I met a friend and toured the National Portrait Gallery, which is a collection of portraits of notable British people from medieval times to the present and ranges from political figures like Winston Churchill and royal personages to ballet dancers, writers and pop singers.  Most are paintings, although in the modern era there are some photos.  Almost every name is familiar from history books (or in the modern era from the news) and I was amazed at how the pictures brought the people to life and in some cases revealed a different character.  In an early picture of Henry VIII he is actually quite thin!

Natural History Museum
    On Thursday morning I finally visited the Natural History Museum, and I spent most of my time in their excellent dinosaur and fossil collection.  I discovered that one of the most important fossil collectors of the last century was a woman named Mary Anning and that she made her first major find at the age of eleven.  I am trying to get more information about her with the idea that I might write a story about her later. [Note: I did include her and her discoveries in my books Giant Sea Reptiles of the Dinosaur Age and  Pterosaurs: Rulers of the Skies in the Dinosaur Age.]

Victoria and Albert Museum
    The Victoria and Albert Museum is across the street from the Natural History Museum so I spent the afternoon there.  It has an enormous collection ranging from paintings (including more Constables and Turners) to costumes and decorative arts from all over the world.  I went to two special exhibits, one of the work of Grinling Gibbons, a wood carver who made elaborate decorations for doorways, fireplaces, mirrors, etc. in the 18th century, and the other of the work of Aubrey Beardsley, whose black and white drawings characterize the 1890’s.  I did a paper on his work when I was in college, although I never saw then the quite shocking erotic drawings that were on display here.

Museum of Childhood
    On the same outing as my visit to Toynbee Hall, I visited the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, a museum that is packed with dolls, doll houses, toys, trains, etc. many from Victorian times but others that were more recent.  It was a bit odd to see Malibu Suntan Barbie displayed alongside China dolls dressed in 19th century outfits.  In the shop there was a series of children’s books on Victorian life in Britain and now that I'm home I regret that I didn't buy one called "Victorian Toilets.”

Royal Academy of Art
    One of my stops was at the Royal Academy of Art, which has a special exhibition of Picasso ceramics.  It is a wonderful show with room after room of all kinds of ceramics including vases turned into voluptuous women, birds and other creatures, plates painted and decorated with ceramic fish and forks, other plates with bullfighting scenes where the plate itself becomes a miniature bull ring, painted tile murals, etc, etc.  The sheer quantity and inventiveness show what a genius Picasso was.  The show was crowded and included a lot of school children taking notes and carefully sketching various pieces.  I thought to myself, what a great homework assignment!  Maybe the kids didn’t think so, but most other children are lucky to see pictures of great art in books or posters.  As I came out of the museum I noticed the elaborately decorated shop windows across the street and realized that the store was Fortnum and Mason’s, the famous food emporium.  So I went in to take a look and it was like another museum with every kind of pickled, bottled, boxed, or packaged food imaginable, all at great cost and displayed and wrapped so nicely that it seemed a shame that one would have to open the packages up to eat what was inside.

Australia's Great Ocean Road

View of the coast along the Great Ocean Road from our B and B in Apollo Bay

March 1999 (excerpt from my diary of our three month stay in Melbourne)   
Our expedition for the weekend was a trip along the Great Ocean Road--Australia’s equivalent of California's Highway 1.  Our first stop was in the port city of Geelong, Victoria’s second largest city and the center of the wool industry.  We toured the National Wool Museum there which was a nicely displayed explanation of the history of the sheep industry and the many steps between a sheep on the hoof and a piece of finished fabric.

Fore! Golf course at Anglesea

After lunch we began our scenic drive along the coast (stopping to view the kangaroos on the golf course at Anglesea) and arrived at our B and B in Apollo Bay by mid-afternoon.  I had decided to splurge a bit and chose a “room with a view.”  Actually we had a whole vacation house that sat on top of the ridge above the town and had a 360 view of the coast and surrounding countryside.  The view was spectacular and it was too bad we couldn’t just stay there for the whole weekend.

Rainforest near Anglesea

The next morning we continued on our way and drove through Otway National Park where we stopped to do a short walk through lush rainforest and then drove to the headland to visit the lighthouse which stands on a cliff nearly 100 meters above the shore.  This is the point that marks the division of the Bass Strait (between Australia and Tasmania) and the Southern Ocean.

Lighthouse on Otway Peninsula

My brother (who was visiting) and I climbed to the top of the lighthouse (no longer in operation but open to tourists) and the attendant told us that going south from there the next landfall was Antarctica; going west, one wouldn’t hit land until reaching Patagonia in South America!  Sailing ships from Europe have to pass the Otway Peninsula on their way to all the major cities along Australia’s east coast and, in former times, before modern navigation, it was a dangerous passage because of the treacherous currents.

The Twelve Apostles

The Ocean Road goes inland for a while at this point and we did a short diversion to visit a beautiful waterfall.   When the road returns to the coast it reaches the most famous feature of this coast--the Twelve Apostles, a series of giant rocky outcrops just off shore. (Actually, you can only see seven.)  Like all the other tourists lined up at the overlook, we took more than enough photos.  Then we finished the trip with a stop for tea and scones in nearby Port Campbell and from there we circled back to Melbourne on a main inland highway.

Details:  We organized this trip by ourselves and went by car using maps and brochures we had gotten from the RAC (Royal Auto Club), which has a cooperative relationship with the AAA. (Remember that in Australia people drive on the left.) 

The Oakland Hills: Huckleberry Nature Trail

A surprising amount of open space is found in the Oakland hills, making it possible to move in a short time from the densely urban sections of the city, to being totally immersed in nature.  Sunday, January 1st, 2012, was one of those remarkable warm sunny days, when even though the calendar said that we were in the heart of winter, the air felt almost summery.  Art and I decided to take hike on the Huckleberry Trail in the Huckleberry Botanic Nature Preserve, part of the extensive trail system running through the San Francisco Bay region.

This 1.7 mile loop winds its away along the side of forested hill, looking out toward the grassy slopes to the north and west.  Although we did have some minor climbs and descents, it was basically easy walking.  Along the way posts with numbered markers served as a guide.  At number six we climbed to the top of a small knoll where there was a bench tucked among the manzanita bushes and a spectacular view.  As we sat there, a hummingbird zipped by and systematically fed from the tiny manzanita blooms.

According to the trail guide, the Huckleberry Preserve is an ecological jewel, preserving plants found nowhere else in the East Bay.  Besides the manzanitas, we passed towering California bay trees, patches of ferns, delicate lichens, and, of course, huckleberry plants.  While we did see other people on the trail, after all it was a beautiful day and a holiday, we enjoyed the feeling of being alone in the great outdoors. The Huckleberry Trail is for walkers only–no bikers, joggers, or horseback riding, which helps ensure its peaceful and relaxing qualities.  I continue to be amazed at how easy it is to enjoy nature close to home, as we continue to explore the area in and around San Francisco Bay.

To Reach The Park

From Highway 24 in Oakland, take the Fish Ranch Road exit immediately east of the Caldecott Tunnel. Continue 0.8 miles to Grizzly Peak Blvd. Turn left and go 2.4 miles on Grizzly Peak to Skyline Boulevard. Turn left and drive approximately one-half mile to the park entrance on the left, past Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve.

The closest bus line, AC Transit #305, runs only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from mid-morning to mid-afternoon. From Lake Merritt BART, 19th Street BART, or Rockridge BART take AC Transit bus 59 or 59A; these bus lines go to the Montclair Transit Center. From there, transfer to AC Transit bus 305 and exit at the stop on Colton Boulevard and Ridgewood Drive. Walk the short distance from Colton to Skyline Boulevard, turn left and proceed to the preserve. It is a mostly level, 0.5-mile walk. Please call AC Transit 511 (TDD/TTY: 1-800-448-9790) or visit www.transit.511.org to confirm transit information.