Birdsong

I've been listening to an audiobook of David W. Blight's Pulitzer Prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, a biography of the mid-19th century black abolitionist. It's a fabulously well-researched and written book. Blight is the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. The book is also beautifully "narrated" - read - by a black voice actor named Prentice Onayemi.

It would not be light reading. I noticed the other day that even though I'd been listening for over three hours, I still had more than 30 to go. How the hell long is this book, I wondered? I finally checked today: 912 pages! 

This is the beauty of audiobooks, though, and of listening while exercising, when you've got nothing else to do with your brain. I would never in a million years undertake a 900-page biography of a figure in whom I had only a passing interest. But this I can do. 

Will I stick to it till the bitter end? We'll see. I'm certainly enjoying it, in part because it's so beautifully read. Onayemi has a gorgeous baritone and uses the cadences of a preacher. I doubt I'd have any difficulty renewing it, which I will definitely have to do. I noticed the book is already remaindered, listing for $30 in paperback but selling for under $10 at one Canadian online bookseller.

The fabulous photograph of Douglass on the book cover is a modern colourized rendering of a Daguerreotype held by the Onondaga Historical Association in Syracuse NY, where Douglass lived for a time. He apparently instinctively understood the power of photography for propaganda and image building. He had many taken. 

Why wouldn't he? He was a striking-looking man. This photo in particular shows his mixed-race heritage - he had some native American ancestry as well as African and probably European. He must have been one of the first black activists to sport an 'afro'. 

I can find no credit for the photo other than the Onondaga Historical Association, but the colourization is very reminiscent of the work of a brilliant Brazilian practitioner named Marina Amaral, who calls herself a 'digital colorist'. Amaral has definitely done another one of Douglass taken about the same time, but her website doesn't show this one.

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I went for a walk this afternoon down to Gibbon's Park, looking for photographic inspiration. I didn't find much - except for the tried and true willows.

The trouble with photographing along the river at this time of year, or anywhere really, is that nothing looks its best. Foliage in summer and snow in winter soften and hide. At this time of year, you can see everything: all the woody detritus, all the fallen trees and limbs, last fall's dead leaves caught in the crooks of branches, leaf-encrusted mud. Not pretty.

CPR railway bridge from Gibbon's Park

You are more likely to catch sight of birds, though. Besides the mallards and Canada geese, I glimpsed a cardinal, a red-headed woodpecker, red-winged blackbird and a robin today, and heard lots of bird song.

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Gibbon's was the park where we went as kids - pre-teens and early teens - to swim in the municipal pool, and occasionally, the river. We were always told the river was filthy, though, as well as dangerous, so we didn't swim it often. 

From my house to Gibbon's, Google Maps tells me, was about 4 kilometers. We regularly rode our bikes. Can you imagine parents today letting their 10- or 11-year-old ride his bike on city streets 4 kilometers to a park with a river running through it. It just wouldn't happen.

Today, I walked over the footbridge. I'm not sure when it was built but there was no bridge when we were kids. I ended up walking along the west bank a way, and remembered how we - friends and I - used sometimes to wade across the river here. It's often quite shallow in the summer, though fast moving.

The attraction, besides the adventure of crossing into relatively unknown territory, was a then still-operating tannery. I don't know what they manufactured, and I can find no reference to its existence online. It's long gone, of course. There are houses and a university facility there now.

We'd go there in search of leather scraps we could use in crafts. I think I had learned leather crafts at a PUC summer day camp or from cubs or scouts or something. I remember the stink of the place and the great piles of scraps outside. If it had rained recently, the leather would be sodden and useless, but if there'd been a run of fine weather, some of it would be salvageable. 

In my memory, nobody paid us any attention, although I remember being afraid we might get caught. There was no fence around the place, and no security - or anybody who interfered with us when we came prowling. We could just walk up to it and root around in the trash.

Different times.

Note to self: check at the central library's London Room sometime if there's any information or pictures of that old tannery to be had.