Alabama Lake House: Days Two and Three

The remainder of our stay at the lake house revolved around putting forth the least amount of effort to gain the greatest amount of pleasure and relaxation. Basically, we spent the whole time lounging in the sun, walking in the woods, and working on our homework at a legendarily slow pace. Seriously, the two turtles swimming around our dock were moving faster than Lis and I.

Barbi, Alita, and Alita's husband Drew came down on Friday, along with their kids, so we spent a good bit of time chatting with them, watching Tatum and Isaac run around with the dogs, and trying to avoid diaper duty with Rowan (Alita and Drew's new baby). I think I'm just going to do the rest of this photo-album style. There really aren't any anecdotes that need to be repeated here, but I still want to share my three days in the sun with everyone.


1 & 2) Aunt Debi and the kids.








3) Uncle Don's chapel, adjacent to the park.

4) Lis holding her new friend, Sadie.

Alabama Lake House: Day One

Well, we drove around 870 miles yesterday, from 9 AM EST until 10:30 PM central time, and we made it here just fine. My uncle J.R. and aunt Christine met us at the local Stop n' Shop about 15 minutes from the family lake house, and we got the grand tour at about 11. By 12, we were more or less settled in and watching our St. Patrick's Day movie -- Boondock Saints. Lewis Smith Lake is about 20 miles north west of Birmingham, and it's got about 500 miles of shoreline according to aunt Christine. It's in the middle of the Bankhead National Forest, and more or less speckled with lake houses like ours. The two in the picture are the two my family owns; we're staying in the "log house" on the right.


Lis and I stayed up late on Tuesday (into Wednesday, really) celebrating St. Paddy's, and we had a nice lie-in this morning. At noon, though, we were up and at 'em. We took uncle Don's canoe out for three and a half hours and toured the immediate area. The water level is pretty high, so all of the caves and crevices I remember from my last visit here are flooded or flooding, but we enjoyed the cliff sides all the same. I photographed a few of the more interesting ones, and we finally settled on a pale cliff with a shelf easily accessible from water level for a brief rest. After docking the canoe, Lis and I dangled our toes into the absolutely frigid water, decided not to swim, and she did a free climb up a crevice in the cliff face.

I'm not too terribly upset that Brice couldn't make it down with us, but I really think he would have enjoyed climbing and rappelling some of the rocks around here. I've included some of the pictures of the shore line here for you all to see:












Aunt Christine made us dinner, we played a bag-toss game after, and now everyone's just off doing their own thing and relaxing. Other than a smart sun burn and few more pages in The Crossing, I really don't have very much to show for myself today. I should work on my Sherman Alexie paper tomorrow. Really, I should.

DC: National Museum of the American Indian

I was "strongly encouraged" (read an extra 20% assignment factored into a four-assignment semester) to visit the American Indian Museum by Doc Cobb, my favorite anthropology professor to date. The museum is so-so, and the building is decidedly - to borrow a word from Brice - "dwonky." (Mrs. Farrell told us it was supposed to resemble Mesa Verde, but I'm sticking with dwonky anyways.)

As it was inauguration weekend, they had dozens of trained, costumed dancers and a live band performing indigenous ceremonies of celebration and blessing (that's what I garnered from the reading materials in the lobby, at least). I watched a few of the different cultures and tribes perform; it was really impressive. The group of NAC members that come and dance in chapel each year had nothing on these guys. I think the music impressed me more than the dancers, actually. The first time we walked in, I thought I was listening to a CD on a high-end surround-sound system. Downky thought it is, that building has superb acoustics.

Speaking of the lobby, Brice got patted-down and practically strip-searched on his third (yes, third) attempted entry. The first time they would not let him in with a large piece of equipment he was carrying (no coat check, wtf?), so we dumped it in the bushes. Then he tucked his pocket knife into a road cone for safekeeping, but a construction worker saw and told him he couldn't leave the knife there. Easy solution: pick up the knife, leave the equipment, and re-enter. They gave us a bag check, walked us through a metal detector, and we got through without a problem. Ish. We made it all of 20 feet into the lobby before three or four security guards came running up (realizing their mistake of allowing a known blade-wielder into their museum) and hustled Brice out the door. (He tells me he had to 1) leave or 2) throw away the knife.) I got a voicemail saying "see you in the lobby in five or ten minutes," and B disappeared around the corner. As I later learned, he ditched his knife in an unused Starbucks kiosk.

Well, as you can imagine, seeing the same man three times in 15 minutes after evicting him once on weapons charges did not please the security guards. Brice's bag got dumped out, the contents rifled through, and he had to submit himself to a full-body search (not full body cavity, just full body). The guards patted him down, had him take off layers, and generally made a spectacle of him in front of the whole crowd gathered to watch the aforementioned performers. I was going to take some pictures, but I didn't think the large, angry security team would appreciate it.

Getting back on track, the museum devotes itself mostly to extolling the evils of Indian relocation policies and showcasing the condition (physical, spiritual, and artistic) of native peoples today. It felt too much like another of Doc's lectures for me to thoroughly enjoy it, but I did enjoy the scant exhibits on traditional handcrafts and religious items. The workmanship is simply exquisite - we saw a piece of bead work so vivid that I thought I was looking at an LCD screen at first.

On the modern end, they had a temporary exhibit featuring the works of Fritz Scholder. Personally, I like his earlier work and his morbid pieces best, the former because of their prismatic smears and the latter for their stark imagery and interesting skulls. This one's called Massacred Indian No. 4, and I think it showcases the best of Scholder's talent. It's simple, spackled with color, gaunt, and stunningly clear. Don't get me wrong - he does do some impressionist works, and you can play "find the skull" with most of them.

Anyways, if you have about 1.5-2 hours to kill and you're bored with the standard Smithsonian setup, start walking towards Capitol Hill and look for the dwonky building with tipis in front of it (not kidding). Just don't upset the security guards, they don't take kindly to "difficult" patrons.

London VII: Hamlet

Well guys, this is it: the very last England post. As I'm writing now, tucked safely away from a frigid blizzard on New Year's Eve almost 3 weeks after coming home, I realize what an amazing opportunity this study abroad provided me with. If I doubted my ability to organize, execute, and cope with international travel before going to England for three months, that doubt is gone now. I am a travel maven (see My Stupid Summer -- details to follow)!

And, perhaps more importantly, I saw Patrick Stewart playing King Claudius (and Old King Hamlet, as it were)! I'll spare you the plot synopsis this time because - let's face it - you either know the plot already, don't care about it, or weren't going to bother reading the details in the first place. (Lazy-author syndrome? Never.) They set the stage in a modern, elegant fashion, and abridged it terribly, but none of that mattered because - as you may recall - I saw PATRICK STEWART in HAMLET.

Let me run that by you again: Jean Luc Piccard with hair, Professor X in battle armor, King Henry II in a tux (if you haven't seen the 2003 remake of The Lion in Winter, go watch it; see the Peter O'Toole original while you're at it). Do you see that gloriously shiny, bald head in the middle of my blurry photo? Yes. That.

Unfortunately David Tennant threw his back out the day before, so Edward Bennet will be playing the lead for the show's entire London run. He did a pretty good job for his first night, but I really missed Tennant's LLL antics on the stage. The mischievous side of Hamlet felt forced and unnatural when Bennet performed it, and he opted for a classical interpretation of the character. I have no doubt Tennant would have played up the whimsical and toned down the melancholy, but then -- I suppose -- we would have to discuss Shakespearean performance theories, and I just don't have the energy for it right now.