"Stuff is eaten by dogs, broken by family and friends, sanded down by the wind, frozen by the mountains, lost by the prairie, burnt off by the sun, washed away by the rain. So you are left with dogs, family, friends, sun, rain, wind, prairie and mountains. What more do you want?"
Federico Calboli
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Future possiblities...
Salim Ali shooting swallows with his 20 bore Jeffries in northern India before the war; Suydam Cutting and Arthur Vernay rather earlier. Anyone know why we should know who they are? (We should).
No idea about the humans. But the little dog in the lower photo looks like a Lhasa Apso-ish type, so I'm guessing the middle feller is a Tibetan Lama of some sort(just not member of the camel family kinda llama).....L.B.
Salim Ali is known as the father of Indian ornithology. I met him on several occasions because he was close associate of Dillon Ripley, and used to visit Washington, DC back in the 80s with a small delegation for the Bombay Natural History Society.
Cutting and Arthur Vernay sponsored (=funded) and participated expeditions to the Subcontinent and SEAsia before Indian independence. Vernay and Cutting might have co-spondored an expedition to Tibet. I've got a water-stained copy of Cutting's Fire Ox. I compiled their expeditions in the 90s, but have lost it.
Salim Ali is known as the father of Indian ornithology. I met him on several occasions because he was close associate of Dillon Ripley, and used to visit Washington, DC back in the 80s with a small delegation for the Bombay Natural History Society.
Cutting and Arthur Vernay sponsored (=funded) and participated expeditions to the Subcontinent and SEAsia before Indian independence. Vernay and Cutting might have co-spondored an expedition to Tibet. I've got a water-stained copy of Cutting's Fire Ox. I compiled their expeditions in the 90s, but have lost it.
Long time no hear, Codger! All right-- I would only add Ali's excellent autobiography, humor about his friend Meinertzhagen, gun collection-- and some of Vernay and Cutting connections, the Vernay Cutting expedition, last to this day into FAR northwest Burma (The Far Ridges, JK Stanford)...
Codger-- his introductory poem in Bewilderment, about the bird on his aunt's lawn (an amazing species that every birder or scientist has had described to him), is what I will reopen the blog with. Merry Christmas!
I think I am going to talk a lot about Asia hands-- Suydam Cutting, Arthur Vernay, the Roosevelts, Dr Rock, Beebe again, Ali, Jean Delacour, Dillon Ripley;; Teilhard de Chardin and maybe Dubois; (and where the HELL did the Peking Man skull go?); my old mentor, Father Anderson Bakewell, climber and big game hunter and snake collector...
I have Ali's bio and more- I enjoy him, and his understated deadpan humor. His fascinating discussion of firearms in his autobiography is a rare non- Western instance-- Raj culture being "half Brit? He shot a 20 bore English double, Mannlicher Schoenauer, a Broomhandle, several Winchesters, more...
I no longer have any volumes of the Dillon- Ali multivolume set of the Indian subcontinent's birds, but I do have its explicit descendant, the two vol "Ripley" "Guide" which is not quite either, but shows its pedigree. And Ali's Sparrow of course.
And Fire Ox, and Stanford, and the memory of (Father) Andy Bakewell (SJ's') delighted "Arthur Vernay was my friend!" when I showed him Stanford's Far Ridges, never mind when I brought him my copy of Bill Tilman's Nepal Himalaya, with its hubristic "... with a priest to pray for us, a doctor to heal us (Oscar Houston), and a woman to cook for us...(Betsy Cowles Partridge; a Catholic would say he went to at least Purgatory for that one!) " how could we not succeed?"
And though they pioneered the route, it took Hilary and Tenzing and another year...
Email us: "ebodio- at- gilanet- dot- com".
It is time to do another look at Andy: descendant of the Bakewells who "... owned Missouri" (Joanie van Ness); who collected snakes for Marlin Perkins, and had seven species, one at least still valid, named for him; whose monster sloth bear, killed because it was eating his Himalayan villagers, was the only one in Rowland Ward's top ten guided by "self", who killed the enormous puma who's skin adorned his floor on a horseback hunt on the Jicarilla Apache rez at 78; whose fridge in Santa Fe bore the legend "We don't serve women here; bring your own!" His "altar" in the ancient Garcia street adobe held the latest Alpine Journal and the current Rowland Ward Records of Big Game, as well as the Social Register and a cocked and locked Colt Commander .45 auto ("What good is an unloaded gun?")
He was my actual connection to my childhood idols Roy Chapman Andrews and Will Beebe; as a younger American Museum collector and New Yorker (he had what Catholics call a late vocation); had seven Andean first ascents, and pioneered air drops in the mountains of Alaska during WW II; allegedly wrote the masters- of- the universe parody "Jesuit Final Exam" that made the rounds in the sixties, mocked Creationists ("God is not stupid!") despite a reactionary romantic aristocrat's soul; was present on both the first circumpolar nonstop flight and the first descent by raft of the Arun, the deep trans- Himalayan river. He died at 87, having lived a decade with cancer on elk and whiskey and red wine, in his own house. I had finally gotten married "legally" by Catholic standards, in Socorro, which he had finagled. I called his house the minute I got back, because he did care, and got his weeping housekeeper, who said "Father Andy passed away 20 minutes ago."
Of course I don't believe Leonard Parker's Comanche coyote gave me my biggest book advance either. As a good Catholic French writer said, "[X] is as hard to believe as life after death..."
8 comments:
I know now, but had to resort to the Google. Won't spoil it for others...
No idea about the humans. But the little dog in the lower photo looks like a Lhasa Apso-ish type, so I'm guessing the middle feller is a Tibetan Lama of some sort(just not member of the camel family kinda llama).....L.B.
Salim Ali is known as the father of Indian ornithology. I met him on several occasions because he was close associate of Dillon Ripley, and used to visit Washington, DC back in the 80s with a small delegation for the Bombay Natural History Society.
Cutting and Arthur Vernay sponsored (=funded) and participated expeditions to the Subcontinent and SEAsia before Indian independence. Vernay and Cutting might have co-spondored an expedition to Tibet. I've got a water-stained copy of Cutting's Fire Ox. I compiled their expeditions in the 90s, but have lost it.
Salim Ali is known as the father of Indian ornithology. I met him on several occasions because he was close associate of Dillon Ripley, and used to visit Washington, DC back in the 80s with a small delegation for the Bombay Natural History Society.
Cutting and Arthur Vernay sponsored (=funded) and participated expeditions to the Subcontinent and SEAsia before Indian independence. Vernay and Cutting might have co-spondored an expedition to Tibet. I've got a water-stained copy of Cutting's Fire Ox. I compiled their expeditions in the 90s, but have lost it.
Long time no hear, Codger! All right-- I would only add Ali's excellent autobiography, humor about his friend Meinertzhagen, gun collection-- and some of Vernay and Cutting connections, the Vernay Cutting expedition, last to this day into FAR northwest Burma (The Far Ridges, JK Stanford)...
To be continued.
Don't miss "A Bewilderment of Birds" by JK Stanford too -- there's a lot on his Burma days there.
Codger-- his introductory poem in Bewilderment, about the bird on his aunt's lawn (an amazing species that every birder or scientist has had described to him), is what I will reopen the blog with. Merry Christmas!
I think I am going to talk a lot about Asia hands-- Suydam Cutting, Arthur Vernay, the Roosevelts, Dr Rock, Beebe again, Ali, Jean Delacour, Dillon Ripley;; Teilhard de Chardin and maybe Dubois; (and where the HELL did the Peking Man skull go?); my old mentor, Father Anderson Bakewell, climber and big game hunter and snake collector...
Codger, some more as Holidays end.
I have Ali's bio and more- I enjoy him, and his understated deadpan humor. His fascinating discussion of firearms in his autobiography is a rare non- Western instance-- Raj culture being "half Brit? He shot a 20 bore English double, Mannlicher Schoenauer, a Broomhandle, several Winchesters, more...
I no longer have any volumes of the Dillon- Ali multivolume set of the Indian subcontinent's birds, but I do have its explicit descendant, the two vol "Ripley" "Guide" which is not quite either, but shows its pedigree. And Ali's Sparrow of course.
And Fire Ox, and Stanford, and the memory of (Father) Andy Bakewell (SJ's') delighted "Arthur Vernay was my friend!" when I showed him Stanford's Far Ridges, never mind when I brought him my copy of Bill Tilman's Nepal Himalaya, with its hubristic "... with a priest to pray for us, a doctor to heal us (Oscar Houston), and a woman to cook for us...(Betsy Cowles Partridge; a Catholic would say he went to at least Purgatory for that one!) " how could we not succeed?"
And though they pioneered the route, it took Hilary and Tenzing and another year...
Email us: "ebodio- at- gilanet- dot- com".
It is time to do another look at Andy: descendant of the Bakewells who "... owned Missouri" (Joanie van Ness); who collected snakes for Marlin Perkins, and had seven species, one at least still valid, named for him; whose monster sloth bear, killed because it was eating his Himalayan villagers, was the only one in Rowland Ward's top ten guided by "self", who killed the enormous puma who's skin adorned his floor on a horseback hunt on the Jicarilla Apache rez at 78; whose fridge in Santa Fe bore the legend "We don't serve women here; bring your own!" His "altar" in the ancient Garcia street adobe held the latest Alpine Journal and the current Rowland Ward Records of Big Game, as well as the Social Register and a cocked and locked Colt Commander .45 auto ("What good is an unloaded gun?")
He was my actual connection to my childhood idols Roy Chapman Andrews and Will Beebe; as a younger American Museum collector and New Yorker (he had what Catholics call a late vocation); had seven Andean first ascents, and pioneered air drops in the mountains of Alaska during WW II; allegedly wrote the masters- of- the universe parody "Jesuit Final Exam" that made the rounds in the sixties, mocked Creationists ("God is not stupid!") despite a reactionary romantic aristocrat's soul; was present on both the first circumpolar nonstop flight and the first descent by raft of the Arun, the deep trans- Himalayan river. He died at 87, having lived a decade with cancer on elk and whiskey and red wine, in his own house. I had finally gotten married "legally" by Catholic standards, in Socorro, which he had finagled. I called his house the minute I got back, because he did care, and got his weeping housekeeper, who said "Father Andy passed away 20 minutes ago."
Of course I don't believe Leonard Parker's Comanche coyote gave me my biggest book advance either. As a good Catholic French writer said, "[X] is as hard to believe as life after death..."
Yeah, I must write about that.
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