Nature trails and picture books: a post with two parts

[asakiyume]

The first part is an appreciation of a nice display of a great picture book, Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History, by Vashti Harrison, in a beautiful setting, the Silvio Conte Nature Trail in Hadley, MA.

The second part is a querulous complaint about a similar but poorly done nature-trail-storybook display.


The Silvio Conte Nature Trail is great if you want a very easy but very pretty walk, maybe with a friend you haven't seen for a while. It goes over a river, through trees and reed beds, and it has vistas where you can see old farm land and hawks.

I went walking there with a friend in early February, and we noticed, partway through the walk, that there were pictures displayed in cases--each one featuring a black woman who had accomplished good things. Some of them were ones we've all heard of, like Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells, but there were others I hadn't heard of, like Mary Eliza Mahoney (1845–1926), a nurse who worked up and down the East Coast...

(Click through the photos to see them bigger)


... and Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891–1978), an artist. I like about her story that she only began to paint seriously after she retired from teaching, and she had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art--the first solo show there of an African American Woman--when she was 82.



The exhibit was special for Black History Month. The cases the pictures were in are very sturdy and weather resistant, and I'm pretty sure I recall other books displayed in them. The only complaint I have was that I had no idea whether the display was of a series of paintings, maybe by a local artist, or whether it was pages from a picture book. We found the first case in the series, which was the introduction--but the artist/author's name wasn't on it, nor the name of the book. I had to Google "cute cartoon famous Black women" to find out that yes, it was a book. Maaaaaybe I missed a sign with that information on it, but I doubt it.


I've seen similar displays elsewhere, but doing them well--by which I mean, so that they're protected from the elements and don't blow away--takes some thought and work, which apparently not everyone is up to. There's a small patch of conserved land across the street from my old high school in upstate NY--the place with the woodland marimba--and they made a display of The Scarecrow, a picture book by Beth Ferry, illustrated by the Fan Brothers. I've been to that little conservation spot three times. The first time, nothing was being displayed. The second time, this story was being displayed--but most of the pages had already fallen down, and in some cases the stake they'd been attached to had fallen over too. And the third time, the story pages were still lying like bits of rubbish along the perimeter of the trail.

The story pages had been laminated, which means they could survive being rained and snowed on. But they were big, and only attached to their stake (a single stake for each page) by velcro. Even when they were successfully on the stake, they sagged because they were so wide and had nothing to hold them spread out. It was really distressing to see them still lying there on my third visit: whoever had made the installation had apparently just put it up and never looked back. As a consequence, what had originally been intended as an added attraction had turned into something actively detracting from the environment of the location.

Maybe partly because of the frustration I felt, seeing that, I began to wonder about the whole project of displaying picture books on a nature trail. Picture books are nice things--I like them very much. And nature trails are nice things--I like them very much too. And there's no reason you can't combine the two (if you think about how to do it responsibly), but by the same token, there's not really any reason why you should. It almost feels as if there's no confidence in what the trail itself, all on its own, has to offer. Why not let an experience of the trail be an experience of the trail--the plants and animals and skies and weather, and what you can happen to see and hear and feel and smell all around you?

Ah well. It's fine to have the picture books. I really enjoyed the Little Leaders. I was just really frustrated with the picture-book-turned-trash in the other case.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Here,the lady everyone has heard of is Mary Seacole.

[asakiyume]

Yes, that name rings a bell even for me, though without doing a quick google search, I can't say for what 😅

[cmcmck]

She was the black equivalent of Florence Nightingale- a nurse and carer with wounded soldiers in the 19th century who all knew her as 'Mother Seacole'.

[teenybuffalo]

Here's where I first heard of Mary Seacole: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=174

[asakiyume]

Now that you link to it, I remember that comic! The past and the present are talking to each other in my brain right now.

(So glad Kate Beaton keeps that archive accessible)

[teenybuffalo]

I am too!

Mary Seacole

[asakiyume]

Wow, just looked her up! She was even earlier! Really impressive.

Re: Mary Seacole

[cmcmck]

A truly amazing woman!

[shewhomust]

The bee in my bonnet is that it's not enough to set up a display, you have to maintain it. Even the very temporary display wouldn't be so sad if someone had cleared away the pages as they fell.

[asakiyume]

Exactly! And I feel like a lot of seemingly nice ideas fall down for that exact reason. "Let's put planters at intersections and fill them with flowers!" --Fine, good: but you are going to have to water and weed those throughout the season. Is your team up for that?

And this seems to be an illness in government/administration, too. The tall one (my oldest child) works for a regional transit system, and he talks about how grants are available if you want to establish new things in your system, but not if you want to make improvements to already existing things. But in this country at least, a lot of what cities and towns need is improvements and fixes to existing infrastructure, not whole new things. (In a few situations, whole new things are also needed--but it's crazy that there's money for that and not for other things... it's a kind of disposability mentality writ large.

--oh boy, I guess I had more rant in me than I thought!

[amaebi]

Yes, very true. Funding for obviously ephemeral things is scarce. (As an academic I offered to get a donor name tattooed on my forehead.) But funding for durable capital doesn't usually include funding for maintenance.

[asakiyume]

I know there's this principle that you shouldn't apply for grants for your basic mission (well, if you're a government entity like a regional planning system, anyway)--you're supposed to be able to handle those things on your own. But (a) that's not really a reality these days! and (b) even if it were, the line between ordinary operating expenses and extraordinary things seems fuzzy. Is a massive capital improvement part of ordinary operating expenses... or not? It's strange that it should only be considered "not" if it involves brand-new systems.

[heleninwales]

Some of our local trails have substantial information boards at interesting points. But what people are also doing is putting up solid posts with a durable label with QR code on each one. If you want to follow the trail and read or hear about the topic, you scan the QR code with your mobile phone and it will display the information for that particular point. Sticking up pages on posts seems a very bad way of doing it.

[asakiyume]

And information about the area is the one sort of signage that I think does go naturally with a trail system--something that tells about the history or the ecosystem, about what types of trees and animals you're seeing, or what activities people got up to in the area, etc.

One thing that was good about the Little Leaders display was that the cases the pictures were displayed in were meant to be permanent, weatherproof, and reusable--but that takes more commitment and resources than some wooden stakes and velcro.

Your area's system of having the QR codes as well seems good. IIRC, the informational sign at the head of the trail in the town I grew up with did have that, with information about the conservancy that had established it. (I think. I'd have to check my photos.)

[amaebi]

That's sad, about display craft. Including the lack of proper attribution on the more carefully displayed book's pages.

I think it's so wonderful that Ida B. Wells and even Sojourner Truth are so well-known now. When I ws a child it is pretty much Harriet Tubman on her own, in U.S. whiteworld.

[asakiyume]

I agree with you about Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth. I think I found out about the latter in high school, but Ida B. Wells I only encountered as an adult. But I do think today's adolescents have heard of them both? Or maybe only in certain circles.

[amaebi]

Last week, apropos of what I don't remember, I recalled a time when my father showed me a bird he was untangling from stickyweed. He said, "These brown thrashers like the brush and sometimes they get stuck."

And it dawned on me for the first time, in remembering this, how I had been taught from earliest childhood that it is sensible and seemly to distinguish between species of plants nd animals and to know their names. And that presumably lack of that is a reason many people known, like, {birds, ducks, geese, canaries} or {red flowers, blue flowers, yellow flowers, stuff that doesn't flower, trees, grass}.

Which is all to say, among other things, that perhaps a lot of people can't read the closeup of a walk, and maybe get tired of Magnificent Vistas.

[asakiyume]

I think you're right! So I think it would be very appropriate to have, for instance, displays along the path that showed you pictures of different types of warblers and when they arrive and where you should look for them and what they eat and so on.

I remember as a kid, going to a different environmental trail area in my town. It had numbered posts along the trails, and you could pick up a piece of paper from a box at the head of the trail that would tell you what you could see at each number. They were things like a well-wood-pecker-pecked dead tree, or a place you could see the pattern of sedimentary rock. I'm not sure how that's done now--not sure those posts are even still there. The place keeps on evolving--the dead tree will be gone now! so the things you'd show people at each spot would change. More continuing attention and engagement needed...

[sartorias]

I do so relish seeing infrastructure repair. Even when it makes one stuck in the same mile for 90 minutes, as happened to me on the way to Las Vegas.

[asakiyume]

It's so important to value fixing things! We can't just run away from our broken-down messes and start fresh all the time.

[sartorias]

Amen to that!

[ranunculus]

Donald was talking about replacing some of the locks in San Francisco "to reduce maintenance". I told him I would drive down and do the maintenance on the locks (which I did) because there is nothing at all wrong with them, they just need a bit of cleaning and lubrication.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping champion right-to-repair legislation, at least it is here in USA.

[asakiyume]

And as always, if you can do that cleaning and lubrication, it keeps things from needing serious repairs later.

[oracne]

This. Yes.

[asakiyume]

^_^

[wayfaringwordhack]

What a thought-provoking post and comment section. Consider my thoughts provoked, even if I don't have time or energy (curse you, seasonal allergies, plus ear-infection thingy!) to jot them down.

<3

[asakiyume]

I do! Thank you!
One day we'll be sitting together, relaxed, with warm (or cool, depending on the season) beverages, and we can talk about ALL THE THINGS without having to have internet or type or ANYTHING ^_^