June 13, 2007
Baltimore's troll colony: The story behind the story
Barbara Saffir's story on the Gwynns Falls Trail, and its photo of the Carrollton Viaduct.
My friend Barbara Saffir came to Baltimore three or four times to report and photograph a story on the Gwynns Falls Trail. She wrote a very interesting Road Trip for the Washington Post, A Trail Full of Charm in Baltimore, May 20.
It was a blast getting to find a secret pocket of peaceful, green Baltimore over the winter and spring when I was invited to accompany Barbara on several of her trips.
One interesting facet of wandering the trail, formerly famous for running through Leakin Park, where Baltimore's murderers dumped their dead until the installation of pillars to keep vehicles off the trail, was its revelation of more than one hidden human world along the trail.
Take a look at Barbara's photo of the Carrollton Viaduct in the original story, above. It took two trips for us to find this pretty vista, one that reminded me of the Pont du Gard, the famous Roman aqueduct standing in Southern France, although of course the latter is far more spectacular.
In classic Baltimore fashion, the viaduct is tagged with 6-foot-high graffiti and the trees along the banks of the Gwynns Falls are festooned with shredded plastic trash bags. Neither of these can fully detract from its green beauty.
As Barbara photographed the viaduct, a group of boys appeared high above us, crossing the viaduct, heedless of the fact a train could come any minute. She finished shooting and, feeling a bit like potential prey, we zoomed away to a busier area of the trail.
We noticed other somewhat strange goings-on. As we strolled along an area not far from the Carroll Park Golf Course, a hillbilly couple emerged from shrubbery along the stream. He was tall, muscular, with a ball cap and tattoes on his bare tanned arms, she was small, blond and skinny. They wouldn't meet our eyes, and went to his red pickup in the golf course parking lot. Open-air sex? An affair? Shooting up? Who knows?
The couple were part of a stream of hillbillies using the railroad tracks -- not the trail, mind you -- as a thoroughfare between parts of SoWeBo (southwest Baltimore). They streamed along a ground-level, north-south part of tracks and climbed up also on the east-west, elevated viaduct running at a right angle.
I could never make it across the viaduct with my fear of heights, but SoWeBomorons sauntered along its unguarded edge without concern.
Barbara and I poked along an unofficial leg of the trail that continues under I-95. She seemed a little nervous during much of the trip that we would be jumped by youths.
Still, she was curious as to why park officials said that due to rights conflicts around I-95, they had to move the labeled Gwynns Falls Trail onto busy streets near the Ravens stadium, yet unofficially, we could see that a spur of the trail continued its sylvan way beside the Falls.
I was thinking about how much this trail under a highway reminded me of my commute beside the Campbell Creek Trail, and under part of the busy Seward Highway, when I worked in 2004 in Anchorage. While I was musing about Alaska, Barbara hollered for me to turn back.
She had noticed sleeping bags, personal belongings and more graffiti indicating human occupation on a broad ledge above the trail. It seems that a community of Baltimore's homeless lives under this stretch of I-95. We got confirmation of this when we continued to Patapsco Valley Sales for some buying of planters at wholesale prices. A member of the staff said that near their shop -- which is probably 1.5 miles away from the golf course -- they see homeless people emerging from under the expressway to go about their daily wanderings.
Do we have an entire, colony of semi-subterranean gnomes, trolls and hobbits under several miles of I-95 in Baltimore?
Cue "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers:
Under the bridge downtown
Is where I drew some blood
Under the bridge downtown
I could not get enough
Under the bridge downtown
Forgot about my love
Under the bridge downtown
I gave my life away.
I sense a book or at least a news article here somewhere.
- posted by jbelliveau at 8:31 AM in The Neighborhood
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June 5, 2007
Awesome wildlife video: Battle at Kruger
Lamont found a Youtube video of this amazing three-way battle at a waterhole at South Africa's Kruger National Park:
I would rank this video awfully high on the list of wildlife videos I've ever seen. It's probably even more dramatic in some respects than a National Geographic video we saw once where an orca whale came up on a gravel beach in if memory serves Antarctica and grabbed a penguin and tossed it in the air.
This shows that the axiom that amateur digital photographers somewhat threaten the pros because they can capture so many images that some are bound to be good is also beginning to occur among amateur wildlife videographers.
It's probably more fun for readers of this blog to just take a look at this video first and then read the rest of my blog, because it will contain some ** spoilers.**
Our traveling party had the great good fortune to witness a lioness kill a hartebeest on a visit to the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. The account below is taken from my first book, 
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet.
Would that I had camera footage of this hunt, but a verbal description will have to do. The hunt we observed was different from the one captured above in that a single lioness conducted the actual kill, she attacked a wildebeest rather than a much stronger water buffalo, and she quickly bought it down with a powerful paw swipe to the spine.
From my chapter: "Giraffes by the roadside: Kenya and Tanzania … and lessons on our love-hate relationship to Africa:"
From our vantage on the roof of the Land Rover, we could see only the flat tops of their heads and a bit of their haunches. From the lower angle of the wildebeest, the lionesses would have been invisible in the grass.Our guide, Mr. Jeffir, put the Land Rover into park and switched off the engine. Although our driver seemed for the most part disengaged and verging on somnolent, even he perked up for the drama about to unfold. Rembeaux, Carly, Jim, Steph and myself were electrified by the possibility, squeezed into the waning moments of our visit to Africa, of lionesses demonstrating how they killed their prey.
“I have been here 20 times, and never seen this,” said Mr. Jeffir, with relative vigor.
Foot by foot, for 30 minutes, the lionesses advanced. “Exactly how my cats stalk birds,” Jim said.
Lionesses, faster and more agile than lions (a fact women seem to love), can reach speeds of up to 35 mph. Still, they lack the upper range of speed of many of their prey, such as wildebeest, which can attain 50 mph. So the lioness must approach closely and lunge before its target can bolt.
We watched a wildebeest, heedless, walk calmly away from the larger group toward the hidden huntresses. “Uh oh,” I breathed.
The end game unfolded. The lead lioness tore toward the isolated wildebeest. A nearby hartebeest, terrified, bolted for its life. The panicked wildebeest ran two steps and made a desperate, tight U-turn.
The lioness, reversing field swiftly in reaction, caught up in two gallops to her prey and raised a mighty right leg toward its shaggy withers. The attacker, probably weighing 300 pounds, swept her huge right paw towards the wildebeest’s middle spine. In a display of might, she dug her spread claws into its back and pulled her giant foreleg to earth, bringing along the entire wildebeest. The victim toppled, its back crashing to the ground. Its four hooves flung once in the air and then fell. Resistance ended, and the animal lay still. The final chase had lasted perhaps 10 seconds.
We swung our cameras at the commotion in another direction. Just as the wildebeest met its end in front of us, two other lionesses behind our vehicle nearly felled a zebra. The herd stampeded, hundreds of hooves raising a reverberating thunder and a cloud of dust. Jim’s photos later revealed the surging head of a lioness above the haunch of the targeted zebra, who somehow barely escaped. Jim and I agreed that the family sheltie, Conan, would last perhaps five minutes out there.
Back at the downed wildebeest, eleven lions and cubs began to eat simultaneously. The killer stood quite near our Land Rover, perhaps three yards away, panting heavily like a struggling train engine. Long scars from past battles ran along her ribs. Too exhausted to eat, she shuffled wearily away.
As we photographed her and the feasting pride, another lioness from the failed zebra maneuver strolled up, unnoticed, inches away from our rear bumper. Had she wanted to jump up, she could have clawed us more easily than the slowest of wildebeest.
The exhausted huntress pants with fatigue near our safari vehicle in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater after bringing down a wildebeest.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:38 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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