Airborne Musings

(Written aboard a flight to Belize in January 2010)

I’m writing this on a flight to Belize out of Miami that I almost missed. I thought for sure seven hours ago I’d have missed the first leg of this journey out of Boston by being stuck in a typical Boston traffic jam which, combined with a driving rain that a descending rain/snow line turned the former into the latter the closer we inched toward Logan Airport, meant I just boarded my 8:25 a.m. flight in time only to sit for the next one hour and 20 minutes waiting for the de-icers to show up followed by waiting for the push-back dudes to show up with their push-back gear.

So then I’m in the air trying to calculate how much effort it would take to make my 1:50 p.m. Belize flight out of Miami if we’re not landing until 1:20. A lot, it turns out, the thought of which made an unreachable knot between my shoulder blades feel like someone boiled a golf ball in nuclear waste and then pounded it into my spine with a nine iron.

So we land in Miami and I hump it over from terminal E to terminal D, and my gate is not D-1, or D-2, or D-3 or anything in the low, merciful range. No, my flight to Belize leaves from D-51 – 51!!! – Absolutely the last gate in the terminal.

So I huff and puff and walk fast and gasp through the 20s, pant through the 30s, start realizing why they call these things a “terminal” as my chest aches through the 30s. Then in the mid-40s, bearing down the homestretch, sweaty, hauling one laptop/camera bag on my shoulder, a small but very tightly packed soft bag in the other, I hear the PA system boom with not my flight number and reasonable request to board, but “Will passenger Paul Kandarian please report to gate D-51. This is the last call.”

So now I break a full trot that leads into a canter and then a full-out gallop (as much so as my 56-year-body will allow, anyway) and my fast walk huff-and-puff turns into a defibrillator-needed pounding-the-ground. Breathlessly I make the gate and the agent says, “Oh, there you are,” like a disappointed hostess awaiting the guy running late with the crab dip.

So we take off on time and as my breathing has just returned to normal, I have my usual mid-air weird thoughts because what else is there to do, I can’t read comfortably on an airplane and I certainly can’t sleep with this golf ball throbbing like a cheap romance novel between my shoulder blades, so I wonder things like:

--Why can’t we use cell phones in flight? Will the plane blow up if we send a text, check our email, download an app? Is it that dangerous a proposition? If it were, don’t you think they wouldn’t even let us bring them aboard in the first place? I mean, really, do they trust us that much? This is an industry that doesn’t trust us to carry more than 3 ounces of liquid in one bottle, for Chrissakes.

And really, how dangerous can it be? Every time there’s a chance of an airline disaster, or worse, a real one, don’t people always turn their cells on and call home for the last time? And are you, like me, really pissed when the news stations play those recorded messages of people who’ve called and couldn’t reach their loved ones?

--How come you can use your cell phone after landing but no electronic device? And what the hell qualifies as an electronic device? Isn’t a cell phone an electronic device? What happens if you do use an electronic device? The plane flips into a ditch?

--It is absolutely guaranteed the more of a hurry you’re in to leave plane 1 to rush to plane 2, the further back of plane 1 your seat will be and the larger and slower the enormous, plodding woman in front of you will be and the gate at which plane 2 is located is the dead last one of that terminal.

--When the price of fuel skyrocketed, airplanes started charging for bags. When the price of fuel dropped, the charge for bags did not. Interesting. And you still can’t get a bag of salted dust (technically pretzels, but we know better) for free on flights anymore where pretty soon during the safety demonstration, they’ll say “before you put on your oxygen mask, swipe your credit card through the device attached to it to start the flow of oxygen. Sorry, we do not accept cash.”

Walk the R.I. Walk - 10 of Them

(THis story ran in the Boston Globe Travel section)


By Paul E. Kandarian
Globe Correspondent

Rhode Island is a small state custom made, it would seem, for putting shoe to ground and walking, by the ocean or through the countryside or down city streets. It seems natural to hoof it here at a slow, steady pace, enjoying the state’s many sights and sounds, particularly at this colorful time of year when the air is crisp and clean.

So while you could perambulate anywhere in Rhode Island and have a good time doing it, consider these 10, some off the beaten path but all paths so very worth walking.

The Narragansett sea wall is a half-mile walk by the sun-dappled ocean that can be a bit chilly when the wind whips off the water. Start out by the last remaining section of the Narragansett Pier Casino, also known as The Towers, which back in its day was more high society than Newport. Walk south on Ocean Road about a mile and hit Black Point Park, a popular fishing spot and home of the Malcolm Grant Trail, a winding, wooded dirt path that opens to beautiful ocean vistas including the Newport Bridge on the far horizon.Be careful on the rocky, steep shoreline: Three have died here in recent years, the rocks can be slippery and the ocean usually turbulent.
Narragansett sea wall, 35 Ocean Drive, Narragansett

For a short walk long on history, take a trek around the 22-acre Conanicut Battery National Historic Park in Jamestown. From 1776-1783 this was an earthen fortification built by colonists and later occupied by the British and likely the French after that, a fortification that is now a beautiful, wide-open meadow. In World Wars I and II, there were six Army command posts here that, among other things, controlled minefields in the east and west passages of Narragansett Bay, of which the battery had a commanding hilltop view. The six in-ground cement stations are still visible, buried in the earth, narrow observation slits sticking up above ground. Walking trails are well marked with information on the history of the site.
Conanicut Battery National Historic Park, Jamestown, Battery Lane, off Beavertail Road, just south of Fort Getty Road.





Mount Hope Farm in Bristol is one of those best-kept secrets that are hard to hide and fun to find in such a small state. This site is historic – here is the Governor Bradford House built in 1745 by Isaac Royall, then one of the country’s wealthiest men and which is now a private inn - but all around it are 200 heavily wooded acres, and streams, fields and ponds, connected by a myriad of walking trails, many of which open to sprawling water views of Mount Hope Bay and the Mount Hope Bridge spanning the bay and connecting Bristol with Portsmouth. The farm was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with purposeful patriotic timing, on July 4, 1976.
Mount Hope Farm, 250 Metacom Ave., Bristol, mounthopefarm.com, 401-254-1270






Benefit Street on Providence’s richly historic East Side was created in 1758, it is written, “for the common benefit of all,” mainly to relieve Main Street congestion. Built along a path of gardens, orchards and family burial plots, Benefit Street today is known as Providence’s “Mile of History,” famous for its colonial and early federal buildings built shoulder to shoulder, handsome, well-kept historic homes that are an eyeful on a lingering walk, particularly in fall when the tree-lined street explodes with color. Particularly notable are structures like the First Baptist Church, built in 1775, its steeple inspired by St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, and the Providence Athenaeum, one of the nation’s oldest lending libraries and where amid the towering stacks, Edgar Allen Poe wooed his lady love, Sarah Helen Whitman, a woman some claim was Poe’s inspiration for his poem of love lost, “Annabel Lee.”

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Rhode Island’s state parks, and rather fittingly, state authorization to purchase the first park, Lincoln Woods, in Lincoln, was given on Feb. 12, 1909 – President Lincoln’s 100th birthday. This 627-acre park five miles from Providence is a sprawling gem of the park system, and one of its busiest, with 2.3 million people visiting last year who took advantage of the chance to hike, bike, jog, swim, ride horses, ice skate, ice fish, just-plain fish, rock climb, boat, picnic or just plain sit around and admire the place. Fall is phenomenal here with radiant reds and glowing gold reflecting on Olney Pond and walkers hiking the occasionally hilly, two-and-a-half mile Les Pawson Loop, named for the Rhode Island man who won the Boston Marathon in 1933, 1938 and 1941 and used to train here.
Lincoln Woods, 2 Manchester Print Words Road, Lincoln, riparks.com/Lincoln/htm, 401-
723-7892

Where to walk on Block Island? Where not to walk on Block Island is more likely, with an island so small – three-by-seven miles – you could conceivably walk around the entire place in eight hours. But one of the most popular places is the Mohegan Trail on the island’s southeast side, home of the spectacular Mohegan Bluffs that rise sharply some 200 feet from the beach below, and the Southeast Light, an historic lighthouse said to be one of the brightest in the east that was once visited by President Ulysses S. Grant. Hiking here gets a bit physical, with the trail following hilly swells and dips, and especially so at a long, zig-zagging staircase allowing you access to the coast and a crisp October walk of up to three miles if you can handle it. Dress for it, wind off the water here is especially chilling.

Fifty acres isn’t a big hunk of land, but at the Emilie Ruecker Wildlife Refuge in Tiverton, they make the most of it. This parcel, once a farm owned by its namesake and donated to the Audubon Society in 1965, is particularly gorgeous in fall, with flat, well-marked trails winding through woods and salt marshes along the Sakonnet River. All manner of feathered creatures can be found here, including great egrets, snowy egrets and glossy ibis; there are blinds here for observing and photographing birds. The 1.5-mile network of trails takes less than two hours to hike. Lingering longer is a worthy option.
Emilie Ruecker Wildlife Refuge, Seapowet Avenue, Tiverton, asri.org/refuges/emilie-ruecker-wildlife-refuge.html, 401-949-5454

You think walking in Newport and what springs to mind? Cliff Walk, sure, but try out a Newport Harbor walk, put together by Friends of the Waterfront, particularly the north walk that covers the historic residential Point Section – the original colonial center of the city that remained relatively unscathed when the British broke up the docks and burned them for heat in the Revolutionary War. There is much to see, including Gravelly Point at the end of Long Wharf where pirates were hanged and President Washington once landed on what was then named – and still is – Washington Street. Historic homes on the less than three-mile walk include Hunter House, used over the years by Tories, the French Navy, doctors and boarding nuns. At the end is Battery Park and one of the best sunset views in the city.
newportharborwalk.com

It makes sense that most of the state-owned Great Swamp Wildlife Management Area, much of which is in South Kingston and partly juts into Richmond, is wetlands, 2,262 acres of it in a preserve of less than 3,500 acres. But you can see lots of it with well-maintained trails coursing through the spongy freshwater low-lying land which erupt brilliantly in fall in a place dominated by red swamp maples. The state-owned area is extremely popular with bikers as well as hikers; the South County Bike Path brushes by its northeast corner.
Great Swamp Wildlife Management Area, 277 Great Neck Road, West Kingston, 401-789-7481

You have your Narragansett Bay and in Watch Hill, a cozy village in Westerly in the farthest southwestern corner of the state, you have Little Narragansett Bay, a waterway best seen by walking along the half-mile long Napatree Beach. At the end of Fort Road is a nature trail that takes hikers out to historic Napatree Point where they can see the ruins of Fort Mansfield, an old coastal artillery post. Resorts and beach cottages dotted this area in the early 20th century – until the Hurricane of 1938 wiped them out.

Revolution, Rhode Island style

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(This story ran in the Boston Globe Travel section)

PAWTUCKET, R.I. – The American Revolution against England was a battle in which much blood was shed.

The American Industrial Revolution, begun here at Slater Mill on the banks of the mighty Blackstone River in 1793, had its own blood lost in the pursuit of mechanized freedom. The belts, wheels and cogs, unfettered by federal regulations in the late 18^th century, would sometimes lop off fingers, break arms and legs, or occasionally fatally crush a child who’d been sent into whirring machinery to clean or fix things.

It is all part of the rich, literal fabric of American technological history at this site where English expat Samuel Slater created water-powered textile machinery that revolutionized the way the new America made things.

This National Historic Landmark is one of the state’s most popular tourist destinations, with some 40,000 visits a year by people from 150 countries, including school groups that in spring number 100 or more children a day.

This area was once clogged with mills, and while many remain that have been converted to office or residential space, the Slater Mill complex is three buildings on five and a half acres in the center of the state’s fourth-largest city. Costumed interpreters take groups through the buildings imparting their history, and private tours are available.

In the main building is mostly replica machinery showing how cotton is spun from raw materials coming to the mill in tightly compressed 500-pound bales. Wispy, cloud-like cotton is carded and spun and woven into tight, strong strands that are fed into clattering machinery whipping it all onto bobbins, machinery that when jammed meant sending someone small enough into it to fix – a child. Quickness was a virtue to avoid getting caught in heavy sliding parts.

Upstairs is the Jencks Education Center which includes the Community Guild Studios, begun in November 2008. It is Rhode Island’s first fiber-arts center, said Steven Chandler, development and marketing manager, offering a wide range of classes and programs, including chair caning, basket making, weaving, spinning and quilting. Local groups use it for meeting space, including the Industrial Revolution Quilt Guild.

In the stone Wilkinson Mill is a replica waterwheel, a 16,000-pound wooden behemoth that was the backbone of any water-powered mill – and where ghosts have been sighted. Ghost tours are held at Slater Mill, and The Atlantic Paranormal Society last year aired an episode of its popular “Ghost Hunters” TV show that was filmed here.

The wheel powers a hub that feeds upstairs to the Slater Mill machine shop, where drills, lathes and sanders are powered by a series of heavy leather belts on pulleys, another source of lost fingers and broken bones back in the day. In one portion of this area is the “Apprentice Alcove,” where children – quite safely – can operate their own mini-machines.

Also at Slater Mill is the Sylvanus Brown House, an original late 18^th-century house with sparse furnishings in chilly rooms and a small garden in back. It is an original building that had been moved here from elsewhere in Pawtucket for preservation.

While visitors may be from far-flung places, many are locals who have never been here or had been ages ago.

“Those are two common responses from people visiting,” said Andrian Paquette, curator. “They either grew up near here and never saw Slater Mill, or haven’t been since they came with their second-grade class. We’re targeting those folks to get them to visit for the first time, or again.”

Slater Mill

67 Roosevelt Ave.

Pawtucket, R.I.

Open weekends March and April, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; May through October, Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; tickets $8-$10.

401-725-8638

www.Slatermill.org

Nantucket museum honors lifesavers

Nantucket’s rich history is by its maritime nature one fraught with disaster, given that the waters sailors love to ply around the island are, in stormy weather, some of the most deadly in the Atlantic.

Paying homage to that danger – and to the spirit of mankind that flies in the face of that danger to rescue those gripped in it – is the newly renovated Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, benefitting from a $3.1 million expansion and opening in 2009 for its first full season, having been closed part of 2008 for the work that more than tripled its size and put the museum’s holdings into a more cohesive display.

In 1968, island resident Bob Caldwell built a boathouse to store his growing cache of lifesaving and shipwreck memorabilia and there it stayed for decades, stuffed and stacked here and there, until the museum merged with the Egan Maritime Institute in 2004, which raised money through donations for the expansion.

The finished project is a fascinating display of things like antique breech buoys that saved sailors from grounded wrecks, a large collection of photographs showing the daily life of the island’s light station keepers and surf men, and one of the most compelling displays, a lighted relief map showing some of the more than 700 documented shipwrecks around the island.
“The wrecks are from 1870-1910, the peak of maritime transportation,” says curator James Lansing. “Some said it was like the ocean version of Route 95.”

Displayed here are the stories of five of those wrecks: The Nantucket Lightship 117 in 1934; the Mary Anna in 1871; the T.B. Witherspoon in 1886; the H.P. Kirkham in 1892; and the W.F. Marshall in 1877.

Making the museum appealing to children is the story of Marshall, a black Newfie rescued from the Marshall, and whose image in little doghouses throughout the museum guide kids through it. Also popular is a hand-cranked miniature breech buoy system, so kids can see exactly how the system worked: A basket and rope-and-pulley system plucked people off grounded vessels.
Very popular was one display, “Madeket Millie,” an exhibit honoring the life of Mildred “Madeket Millie” Jewett, an unofficial coast watcher for the Coast Guard who was so valued for her devotion that the U.S. Coast Guard made her an honorary commissioned warrant officer, and scattered her ashes from a helicopter when she died in 1992.

And not to be missed is a continuously playing video about the historic rescue of the Kirkham crew by the Coskata Lifesaving Station surf men, a grueling rescue involving a row of some 15 miles through storm-tossed waters and taking 26 hours to complete. Not a single life was lost. The film’s title is the Coast Guard motto: “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back,” dedicated to the brave men of the U.S. Life-Saving Service – which became the modern Coast Guard.

“These were very proud men, they were all about values,” Lansing says. “This is what people did to help others.”

Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, 158 Polpis Road, 508-228-1885, www.nantucketshipwreck.org; admission free for members, $5 for non-member adults, $3 for non-member children, fee includes admission to historic Coffin House in downtown Nantucket.

CAlifornia Dream Built Tuscan Castle on a Hill

This is a story I did a couple years ago on a great winery in the Napa Valley, we'd happened across this giant, genuine castle and there was a story in the making. I pitched it to the Globe back home, they said do it, and that's that, it appeared about a month later. Fascinating story of a man of extreme passion and boundless vision who made his dream come true.

CALISTOGA, Calif. – As Daryl Sattui bent his lanky, 6-foot-5-inch frame to fit through an arched stone doorway in his just-opened Napa Valley “Castello di Amorosa” (castle of love), a metaphor could not help but spring to mind: Is this guy in way over his head?

Sattui, 65, owner of the very successful V. Sattui Winery just down Route 29 in St. Helena, leveraged himself up to his bright blue eyes to get this monster built, a magnificent castle atop a hill overlooking a terraced, Tuscan-style vineyard. It is a massive stone structure that replicates castle design from the 11^th to 16^th century and is much homage to his love of ancient architecture as to his passion for creating award-winning wine.

Consider: The place set him back $30 million, consists of 107 rooms (including an honest-to-goodness torture chamber complete with a genuine antique Iron Maiden and a replica rack), seven levels (four of them underground) and took 14 years to build. His V. Sattui Winery, begun by his great-grandfather Vittorio, closed during Prohibition and reopened by Daryl Sattui in 1976 with borrowed labor and money from friends, helped pay for most of the castle; V. Sattui’s 400,000 visitors a year make it one of Napa’s busiest wineries. But in the last couple years of meticulous castle construction, Sattui’s budget was blown and he started borrowing.

“I had a budget but threw it out, now I’m all in,” Sattui smiled as he walked me through and around his castle which opened to the public April 9 for tours and wine tasting. “Except for my retirement, I’ve sunk every dime I had and then some into this.”

That ‘this’ is pretty substantial. The castle is part of the overall 171-acre winery, is 121,000-square-feet big, and was designed to be look like what a castle was supposed to be: A defensive fortification. Its architectural design purposely spans the centuries because European castles always underwent modifications, expansions and renovations over their lifetimes. And being made of stone, they tended to last a very long time.

Unless they were blown apart by attackers. Sattui even has that covered: One of the towers was created to look like it was shattered by cannon fire.

The design was expensive, no detail overlooked to make it as authentic as possible. Much of the 8,000 tons of stone, most of it basalt, was hand squared on site. The castle consists of five towers with battlements, a church, a gigantic drawbridge, a dry moat, and a monstrous great hall with double doors held together by 2,000 nails handmade in Italy.

The great hall is majestic – 22-feet high, 72-feet long and 30-feet wide – able to host 180 people, boasting a 500-year-old fireplace and floor-to-ceiling wall frescoes hand painted by Italian artisans that took a Michelangeloan-like year and a half to complete. Ancient-looking wrought iron throughout the castle was made to look that way by dousing it with acid. Hand-carved sandstone gargoyles keep garish sentry on walls and towers.

Below ground are a labyrinth of wine chambers –900 feet long in all - smelling sweetly of the casks bearing the fruits of the vines from the rich earth above. Escape tunnels are here as well, as are dead ends. At one point in our walk, the impish Sattui sent me into a hallway that got smaller and went nowhere.

“I sent Gov. (Arnold) Schwarzenegger up there,” he said with a laugh about a reception attended by the actor-turned-governor who took a tour with Sattui that included a trip to the terminated hallway. “He hit his head.”

Something this large might seem to indicate a rich guy’s out-of-whack ego, but Sattui is as immensely likeable, soft spoken and low key as they come. Take the tour of the castle, you may well run into him as he tidies up after a tasting, and he’ll be happy to regale you with the nuts and bolts of how the castle was designed and built, but more importantly about the wine that is made there.

“I have a real passion in my life for all things Italian, the architecture, the art, and especially the wines,” he said, his large hands cutting the air as he spoke. “This is partly homage to my ancestry.

“And,” he admitted sheepishly, “it’s partly I just don’t know why. I just wanted to do it.”

He’d never designed anything bigger than a doghouse in his life, he said, calling himself a closet architect. He built the castle mostly to showcase his quality wine, and he seems to know whereof he speaks: His V. Sattui Winery has been named the state’s top winery in two of the last three years, and over the years the wines produced there have won more than 75 gold medals in various worldwide competitions.

Designing the castle came after numerous trips to Italy to get ideas, and poring over thousands of photos and blueprints of other castles to make sure he got it right. After a year of making his own designs, he turned them over to an architect. Fourteen years later, the dream was realized.

“I didn’t care to rush it, I enjoyed the project and I certainly didn’t do it for the money, though I’d hate to go broke,” he said, then admitted “no prudent businessman would ever do this.”

He may not be prudent, but he’s decidedly different. The San Jose State University graduate started up V. Sattui in 1976, opening a deli to sell meats and cheese as well, something no other winery was doing. Others thought him crazy, he said. Now most do and it’s a huge part of the winery business.

Sattui always had the business bug, he said. During his college days, he sold college t-shirts and other merchandise to students. He even sold clogs before clogs were popular, including through Filene’s in Boston.

“I thought it would make me rich,” he shrugged. “But I didn’t know the shoe business. I was trying to make a buck a pair and I really should have been making more. But I just wanted people to have these shoes.”

He feels that way about his wine. Castello di Amorosa wine is not sold in stores, only onsite and online, and is reasonably priced, from $19 for the Rosato di Sangiovese 2005 to $68 for the Il Barone Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2003.

The castle does about 8,000 cases a year, V. Sattui five times as much. He’ll have to sell a lot of wine and hold a lot of tours here to pay off the $30 million he’s sunk into the place. But that’s history as ancient looking as the castle he built.

“I’m at the point in my life where I want to do the things I want to do,” he said with a shrug. People might say I’m nuts, but I don’t care. I’ll be dead in 15 or 20 years, but this will be around a lot longer.”

He knows the allure of visiting the castle might be more theme-park than wine-loving, but downplays the angle of the former, stressing the latter, all the while realizing that a $30-million, 107-room castle with a torture chamber just might be something of a curiosity. That’s fine by Sattui, long as it gets people here to sample the fruits of his labor.

“I want people who are serious about wines to come here,” he said. “I thought if I built something beautiful to showcase it, they would.”

(Castello di Amorosa, 4045 North Saint Helena Highway, 707-942-8200. For information, visit castellodiamorosa.com)