Mr. Mulholland’s Big Oops!

15. May 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Old West

I was watching one of my favored YouTube series, when a particular historical series showed up on my feed, reminding me of a notable but now mostly forgotten man-made local disaster: the failure of the St. Francis dam, in 1928. This dam was situated in a canyon in the San Gabriel mountain range, 40 miles north-west of Los Angeles, California. The canyon fed into the Santa Clara River, which eventually emptied out into the Pacific Ocean. The resulting disaster is comparable to the Johnstown flood some forty years previously on the other side of the country. Both disasters involved a sudden and horrific dam collapse, after concerns about the stability of the dam had been raised – and dismissed, with catastrophic results, but there are some key differences: the St. Francis dam was a new, carefully designed and watchfully tended concrete construction. It was a key component of water supply to a growing city – not a half-forgotten, shoddily maintained earth dam on private property.

I grew up in that part of the country, so the names of towns affected by the disaster in 1928 are all vividly familiar. I went to Girl Scout camps in Saugus, my youngest brother still lives in Santa Clarita, and my paternal grandparents lived for years in Camarillo, where the catastrophic flood from the dam failure finally washed out into the Pacific Ocean. The name of William Mulholland was also familiar. A scenic avenue winding through the range of hills separating the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles proper was named for him. The family who lived in the house next to my maternal grandparents on Lotus Avenue in Pasadena were also surnamed Mulholland; I’ve always wondered if they were related.

William Mulholland himself was a Scots-Irish immigrant from Belfast, who ran away from an abusive home and went to sea as a merchant sailor. Then he knocked around the US as an itinerant laborer, before winding up in Los Angeles in 1877. He got a job there tending the various channels and ditches which supplied water. Somehow that work fired ambition in a young man who had drifted from one menial job to another, before finding his calling in a mission to supply of water to a growing urban population – in a place where water appeared all at once and then often not at all. He studied nights, taught himself engineering, with all the necessary mathematics to underpin a career as a professional civil engineer and eventually rose higher and higher in the civic establishment which employed him. By the early part of the last century Mulholland was the head of Los Angeles’ water and power division, dedicated to supplying water for a growing metropolis. His knowledge of the water system was encyclopedic, as most of it had been built under his supervision and to his designs. He was a key figure in a decade of underhanded shenanigans involving water rights, getting water diverted from the then-prosperous farming area around the Owens Valley to Los Angeles through a huge aqueduct, in use to this very day. This was known as the California Water Wars, elements of which were later and very (very!) loosely dramatized in the movie Chinatown.

As part of the immense aqueduct project, Mulholland felt it was necessary to maintain a holding reservoir to regulate the water supply – just in case of a prolonged drought or an earthquake damaging the aqueduct. Eventually his choice fell on a steep-walled canyon just north of present-day Santa Clarita, some 40 miles from Los Angeles proper, as it was then. Towns along the lower Santa Clara River include Valencia, Newhall, Castaic Junction, Fillmore, Bardsdale and Santa Paula; then a semi-rural country of farms and orchards.
Mulholland used the same basic design he had done for a previous dam, just adapted for the Francisquito Canyon site: a massive concrete gravity-arch construction, the same design as the later Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. After careful consideration, he selected a place in the canyon where the canyon itself was wide enough to accommodate a generous reservoir and then naturally narrowed at a point suitable to construct a dam. There were flaws in construction, one of which could be laid to Mulholland as a designer and sole authority for the water and power component. He increased the height of the dam by ten feet, without correspondingly broadening the base to compensate. The other weakness was a geologically fragile underpinning of the canyon, which would prove to be susceptible to the quantities of water in the reservoir, once filled. Although Mulholland directed bores and water percolation tests be run prior to beginning construction, technology available to him in the 1920s was not enough to detect that fragility in the layers of rock underneath and in the canyon walls on either side.
By the mid-1920s, the area along the Francisquito Canyon was an intermittent construction site, with camps for laborers, and small housing areas for workers at two new power plants. Construction on the dam began in August 1924 and was completed by May, 1926. As water began to fill it, some leaks and seeps were noted in the structure and in the abutment on the west side; noted and categorized as normal and expected in a concrete dam of that size. The dam continued filling over the next two years, without giving any particular cause for concern. The resident dam keeper, a man named Tony Harnishfeger lived with six-year-old son and his girlfriend in a small cottage about a quarter of a mile down the canyon from the dam. Harnischfeger was charged with regularly inspecting the dam and the abutments on a daily basis and informing his superiors in Los Angeles of anything out of the ordinary. Later, a close friend of his testified that Harnishfeger had expressed deep concerns about the dam to his employers and that he had been told to stop bringing them up or lose his job. Well – maybe … but if he had been that worried over the stability of the dam, one would think he would have found another place to live, rather than in a house below that dam….

In any case, on the morning of March 12th, dam keeper Harnishfeger discovered an alarming new leak – and one which spurting irregularly and of muddy, not clear water. This would indicate that somehow water had undermined the dam’s footings – not a leak in the dam itself, which would naturally be of clear water. He called Mulholland immediately. Mulholland and his assistant (and later successor) Harvey Van Norman, rushed by automobile to St. Francisquito canyon – a journey of some hours over mostly dirt roads in a relatively comfortless early model automobile, and joined Harnishfeger in examining the frightening new leak and the dam itself over a visit lasting several hours. Yes – it was concerning, that the water was muddy … but Van Norman eventually found what he thought was the real source for the muddy flow – the water picking up dirt from a new access road. The leak was worrisome, and eventually something would have to be done about it but … nothing urgent. The two engineers returned to Los Angeles, leaving Harnishfeger alone with his worries.
And that night, just a few moments before midnight – the worst possible collapse happened. Both sides of the dam utterly collapsed, leaving the center segment standing upright and still rooted in the canyon floor. No one saw it who could testify afterwards as to which segment gave way first – no one who lived. About the nearest witness to the disaster was a carpenter employed at one of the powerhouses in the canyon. His name was Ace Hopewell; he rode past the dam about ten minutes before midnight on his motorbike on his way back to where he lived and saw nothing unusual or worrying. A little farther up the canyon he thought he heard the rumble of a landside over the sound of his engine. Slightly worried, he stopped and listened – and the sound died away.
What Ace Hopewell heard in the distance was those catastrophic moments when both east and west sections of the St. Francis dam gave way, probably almost simultaneously. Enormous chunks of concrete broke into smaller chunks as the water behind the dam – as more than 12 billion gallons of water instantly rushed out. It was estimated later that the entire reservoir emptied completely in a little over an hour. No one below in the canyon had a chance. The power station below the dam was obliterated, as was the little hamlet where the workers and their families lived. Only three survived, out of the 67 known to be at that site. A sudden flickering in electric lights and a sudden drop in power in Los Angeles may have been the first indicator there of bad trouble.
At 40 minutes past midnight, as near as can be estimated, the surge of water out of the canyon burst into the Santa Clara River. By one AM, the water had demolished the power plant in Saugus, darkening the entire valley, from Santa Clarita to the coast. Raymond Starbard, employed at the Saugus substation is nearly carried away by the flood, but manages to fight his way out of the water and get to a working telephone. He calls the sheriff’s substation in Newhall, the next town down the river valley; he is credited with being the first to get the word out about the looming disaster.

Meanwhile, the flood overwhelmed a Southern California Edison worker’s camp laid out on the riverside flats five miles further downstream. The only warning the 150 workers there got was from a night watchman Edward Locke, a disabled veteran who apparently heard the rumble of the approaching flood and ran from tent to tent, shouting a warning. The tents were canvas on wooden floors: workers who went to sleep with the tents buttoned up tight against the night air had slightly better odds of surviving, as that provided a bubble of air inside which held out just long enough to float as the surge carried the tents away. Despite the warnings, 84 workers there were lost including Edward Locke. By now the floodwater included trees, brush, and wreckage from shattered buildings. bridges, and machinery; a deadly moving slurry of water, mud and fragments.

In the small town of Santa Paula, some thirty miles downriver, Miss Louise Gipe, a duty telephone operator, received an urgent warning of the dam failure from someone in authority at the telephone company offices. Miss Gipe immediately began calling local officials, including the police – and then began making individual calls to homes closest to the river. This, in a day when making such calls meant patching calls manually, one by one. Others notified was Thornton Edwards, a motorcycle policeman of the State Motor Division (a predecessor of the California Highway Patrol) who lived in Santa Paula and Santa Paula police officer, Stanley Baker. Edwards immediately woke up his family, and his neighbors, saw them to safety on higher ground and then hopped onto his motorcycle with siren blaring, set off to alert as many as he could by going to every third house, waking the inhabitants and ordering them to get their neighbors and move to safety. He kept at it until three feet of water swept him off the bike. Stanley Baker did the same – because of their efforts, Santa Paula only suffered 16 known casualties in the flood, although many homes in low lying areas were wrecked by the flood, including Thornton Edwards’.

The massive surge of water, still moving at an estimated 6 miles per hour emptied out into the Pacific Ocean at 5:30 in the morning. Bodies of victims were pulled from the ocean for days, some floating as far south as the Mexican border. Others were buried deep, and only discovered as late as the 1990s, when construction excavation unearthed two victims near Castaic Junction. The bodies Tony Harnishfeger and his son were never found at all. Eventually the human toll stood at 431, although revised estimates postulate as many as 600; it was a rural area, farm country, with many itinerant and undocumented farm workers and ordinary hoboes; no registered address, no telephone, no one noticing if a little camp by the river or under a bridge, with a dozen people living in it was gone when the flood swept through.
Of course, the flood made all the newspapers; it was the early twentieth century, with all the technological advances. At the time, this was the worst disaster to hit California since the San Francisco Earthquake – and it seemed as if it could have been, should have been prevented. The public, especially those who had their homes and livelihoods wrecked, and those who lived downstream from other planned reservoirs, demanded answers. Civil authorities, from the governor on down obliged with a series of hearings scheduled almost immediately in the wake of the disaster. Naturally, William Mulholland and his department were questioned about everything to do with construction of the St. Francis dam. Most unusually for an executive-level bureaucrat in any modern time, Mulholland publicly accepted full responsibility for the disaster; he refused to shift blame for the failure to anyone or anything else. He and his department escaped criminal culpability, as no one at the time could have known about the geological instability in San Francisquito Canyon until the dam itself collapsed – but the loss of life in the collapse appears to have weighed dreadfully on him, at least as much as the monumental failure of one of his grand projects. He retired from his position at the end of the year. and died in 1935; a semi-recluse at the end of his life.

Chunks of concrete from the dam are still strewn across the bottom of San Francisquito Canyon. The center portion, which remained standing, was demolished after a sightseer fell off of it and died a year later.

Diversions

05. May 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Domestic

It’s been a bit of a fraught week, what with the water leak in the main between the meter and my house – which meant that it would fall on me to have the main repaired or replaced, if repair was not possible. Which is what it turned out to be. Well, my house was built in the mid-1980s, by a reputable builder who poured a substantial cement foundation slab on a relatively stable part of the development and refrained from adorning my place with more than a minimum of brick facing on the front. In that respect I have gotten off lucky, in comparison to some of the neighbors with larger houses, farther up the hill. Many of those houses were built on thinner slabs on fill, or part-fill, and have heavy brick facing on at least three sides. So only having a plumbing issue after 30 years of ownership, instead of constant and expensive foundation issues …  piece of cake, in comparison.

I’ve also been fortunate in replacing siding, windows, HVAC, and water heater in the last couple of years, although I am still paying on those projects. About the only really big renovation remaining to do is to put down luxury vinyl flooring and have the kitchen cabinetry upgraded. Still – I’m currently in a more comfortable housing situation than those home renovators which are my favorite YouTube watch … even if my own little patch of paradise is not in a particularly scenic location or has any interesting architectural or historic merit. I’ll count the blessings that are mine!

One man in Portugal is rebuilding his grandparent’s fondly-recalled stone house in the village where he grew up. He is also reclaiming the truck garden and corn field; the view down the valley from his place, towards a range of hills on the eastern horizon is particularly lovely. I don’t care much for the look of his house – just a couple of plain stone-build blocks with a new tile roof – but the location is marvelous. Sometimes, he takes the camera on a jaunt through the narrow stone-walled lanes of the local village, past pergolas swagged with grape vines, ancient stone houses and little gardens which reminds me of some of the little towns we visited in Spain. He goes for the natural sounds in the audio:  of birds, the chimes of the local church sounding the hours, and the distant sound of a tractor turning over furrows in the next field over.

A young English/Venezuelan couple is also renovating an extremely decrepit Portuguese farm; they are much farther along in their project. They installed a shipping container as a tiny residence, while they worked on the much-decayed farm outbuildings. They’re saving the crumbling main house for the last. They’ve just about finished the two ranges of farm outbuildings; most of one and all of the other were in such appalling condition that they knocked one down entirely and rebuilt in concrete block sheathed in reclaimed stone. The other range was partially rebuilt within the shell – the rest serves as a workshop, while they hope that the roof doesn’t fall in entirely. Their brother-in-law is a skilled stonemason, who has done just about all the work in stone, while the husband has taught himself an acceptable level of fine carpentry.

Then there is another young couple – English and Slovenian rebuilding an ancient and scenic stone and wood three story cabin on a sloping hillside in a little village in Slovenia. (I had to look up where Slovenia is; I thought somewhere in Central Europe? Ah; part of what used to be Yugoslavia. The mountainous part, near to the border with Northen Italy, once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Isonzo Front in the First World War.)

That little cabin was in truly parlous condition. After looking at the ‘before’ pictures, I believe that if the second story of wooden logs notched together at the corners hadn’t been of such sturdy timbers the whole thing would have collapsed and slid down the hillside entirely. The bottom level, set into the hillside itself was of limestone slabs mortared together. The mortar in some sections of those walls was so decayed that videos showed them being demolished with bare hands. They ran jacks underneath to support the timber upper walls and completely rebuilt each stone wall in four or five-foot sections – and installed French drains in a gravel bed all along the base of those walls below ground level. Now they are at a point of working on replacing the decayed wood sections and fitting out the interior. Also running in necessary electricity and plumbing – this in a structure for which both were a minor afterthought at least a hundred years or more after original construction. It’s a lovely little building, though. I reckon that it will be at least one more year before it’s structurally sound enough to actually move in and set up housekeeping.

The last cottage under renovation on YouTube is likewise in a scenic location, just as old and only marginally less decayed; an originally thatched Cotswold cottage (with a newer garage/apartment adjoining). This real estate heap is being worked on by a young English couple. They fell in love with the cottage, and bought it, thinking they would live in the apartment over the garage, while they renovated the cottage … except that the picturesque thatched roof was decayed to the point that there were mushrooms growing inside the place, essential beams were rotting away, and the garage annex was not all that much better condition. After much toil by friends and family, they managed to remove all the thatch, replace the roof with stone tiles and build in French drains around the walls to reduce the soggy condition of the place whenever it rains – which it does frequently as this is England. Alas, in the latest installment, while digging in the old building to install a new water main, the husband managed to break a hole in one sewer outfall serving both buildings. It’s a large ceramic pipe; and every attempt to cut it and install a connector and a new stretch of pipe just shattered even more of it. Now he and his very pregnant wife and their crazy spaniel dog have had to move out until it can be repaired …

Yes – looking at all of that – I am counting my housing blessing. All I have from this week is a front garden which looks like a WWI battlefield in miniature, what with all the trenches running through it.

Recollections of Vietnam – At a Distance of 50 Years

02. May 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Memoir

Fifty years – half a century since the last helicopters lifted off from Saigon. To us now, it seems as far away in time and nearly as pointless as the Western Front, as I noted in another reminiscence some years ago.

Platoon seems as much of a relic as Journey’s End, the image of a helicopter hovering over jungle with All Along the Watchtower on the soundtrack an image as archaic as doughboys with puttees and soup-plate helmets, marching along and singing Mademoiselle from Armentieres.

In that summer, I was a college student, volunteering with a small volunteer refugee resettlement in the far distant Los Angeles suburb where I lived with my family then. Our Lutheran church banded together with a couple of other local churches, the Lions’ Club and a handful of volunteers to sponsor Vietnamese refugees. We thought, by pulling in all our resources that we could manage an extended family of up to 25 members, adults and children, as we had been given to understand that was where the need was greatest: sponsors for large families. In their infinite wisdom, Lutheran Social Services at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas (which location was one of the holding camps for Vietnamese refugees in that year) sent us three small family groups and four single young men. We had just enough in our collected funds to rent a small house and two apartments – the single young men were farmed out to families. One of the young men, named Kiet, who turned out to be just barely 18, went to our family and lived with us for more than a year. (His maternal uncle was resettled in Houston with his family, and Kiet eventually went to live with them.)

All of our sponsored families and the young single boys had stories of how they escaped. The youngest of the four was a younger son from a prosperous family; they scraped together the funds and documents to send him out of the collapsing country by commercial air, wanting one of their family to be safe and out of what was expected to be a bloodbath by the victorious North Vietnamese. Another was an enlisted tech in the Viet Air Force; he and others from his unit were all evacuated out on a Viet Air Force transport to Thailand, and then to the Philippines and on to the United States.

Kiet had the most hairbreadth escape. He was also a Viet Air Force enlisted man; a security policeman, on duty at Tan Son Nhut, assigned with his fellows to work crowd control – on the very last day that fixed wing aircraft could operate as the North Vietnamese had begun shelling the runway. Only helicopters could take off from Tan Son Nhut then – and in the rush of the panicked crowd, Kiet was carried off his feet and shoved up against the door of one of those helicopters. On an impulse – as he always insisted that he hadn’t planned to escape – he threw away his weapon and got in. The helicopter staggered into the air, hideously overloaded with frantic people – and barely made it to the USS Hancock. One of the first humorous remarks that I ever heard from Kiet was when all of us were watching a Jacques Cousteau special on underwater archeology. With a grin, Kiet said that he knew exactly where there were a great many helicopters on the bottom of the sea.

There were so many helicopters coming out to the Hancock and trying to land that the American crew could only throw them overboard, as soon as they were emptied of people. Clear the flight deck, and there were five more overburdened helicopters running on fumes, desperate to land on the Hancock’s flight deck.

The family that I knew best because the husband and wife spoke English well were the Tran family: Xuan-An and Hai. They brought pictures of where they lived in the highlands in a town called Dalat; snaps of cool, misty green pines and gardens of rhododendrons, and a horizon of mountains. Eventually, they had to flee Dalat for Saigon, where their youngest daughter was born, and Xuan-An’s mother came to live with them. Hai had left Hanoi as a teenager when the Communists took over there, his family being well to do, part Chinese, and immensely scholarly. He worked as a librarian for the USIS, and Xuan-An as a teacher of English and sciences. They were on the Embassy list of Vietnamese citizens to be evacuated in the spring of 1975, with their four children, aged 12 to 2 years old. They were still waiting at their home, for someone to come fetch them. Perhaps someone from the Embassy might have come for them eventually, but Xuan-An’s brother who was the captain of a Vietnamese coastal patrol vessel came to their house after dark, instead.

He had sent his crewmen all to fetch their families, they were going to make a run for safety out to sea, and he came to get his and Xuan-An’s mother, who would later be known to us as Grandmother. He was horrified to find his sister and brother-in-law and the children still there. He urged them to come with him straight away, and not wait any longer for rescue. They came away with only what the adults could carry, in small packs the size of student’s books. The youngest daughter was a toddler and had to be carried herself. The motor launch was a hundred feet long, and there were a hundred people crammed onto it, carrying them out to an American cargo ship, the Pioneer Contender, which waited with other American rescuers, just beyond the horizon.

Always take the family pictures, Xuan-An said, when she showed me the album, Anything else in the world you can get back again or something like it, but not family pictures. And jewelry. You can always sell jewelry.

It was an article of faith among the South Vietnamese fleeing Saigon in 1975 that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong would treat anyone with the barest connection to the Americans and the Saigon government as brutally as they had treated civilians in Hue, when they overran that city during the 1968 Tet offensive. Those on the losing side of a vicious civil war were not inclined to trust in the magnanimity of the victors, since none had ever been demonstrated heretofore. They took their chances and whatever they could carry and fled, by boat, and by aircraft.

Grandmother had made a vow, that if all of her family escaped, and were safe, she would shave her head, and so she did: when I first met her, her hair was coming back, an inch or so long. One of Xuan-An’s pictures was of Grandmother in her youth; she was gorgeous and looked like the Dragon Lady of Terry and the Pirates fame.

In the vast mess-tent one day, a young Vietnamese man began complaining loudly about the spaghetti and meatballs being served, and a little, elderly Vietnamese woman in line behind him asked him what his name was. The young man turned out to be the son a of a high-ranking South Vietnamese officer, whereupon the elderly woman dumped her bowl of spaghetti and meatballs on his head and told them that if his father had only done his job better, then none of them would have had to be eating food like that. Xuan-an still giggled when she told me that story. I wonder if Grandmother might have been the dumper of spaghetti.

Xuan-An and Hai, with their children and Grandmother were the first of the families to be sent to us. We had spent a weekend cleaning out the tiny rental house we had found for them, and fitting it up with donated furniture, linens and kitchenware. As we were raking up and bagging desiccated dog-poop from the dusty little side yard, the owner of the house across the road came over and asked what we were doing. When we explained that we were setting up the house for Vietnamese refugees, he asked if we needed a refrigerator, and brought it across the road on a dolly when we said yes. The town was quietly, undemonstratively supportive: like the little elderly Vietnamese woman in the camp, I think a lot of local people felt that we had not done a good job, we had left a lot of good people in the lurch, and now we owed them. (Sunland-Tujunga at this time was a working-class to no-class and blue-collar sort of town – the kind of town where young men accepted the draft, rather than resisting it.)

Xuan-An and Grandmother practically cried when they first walked in, as plain and minimal as the house was. Grandmother immediately took over the housekeeping, while her son and daughter took two jobs apiece. The youngest daughter, Tao, at the age of three became Grandmother’s translator when school began in the fall for her sister and brothers. They made an interesting pair, in the local Ralph’s grocery, a tiny elderly Vietnamese woman in black loose trousers and white blouse, earnestly picking over the fresh fruits and vegetables, and Tao, barely up to Grandmother’s elbow, translating from English to Vietnamese and back again. I am not sure that Grandmother really needed a translator, after a while: she had the most elegantly expressive face and hands, and the gift of communication without language. We always knew what she was on about, and she instantly divined whatever it was we were trying to get across. Without ever learning any other English other than the word “Hello”, Grandmother also become quite fond of the soap opera General Hospital. She did all the cooking, putting the cutting board on the floor of the kitchen and dismembering a whole chicken with a cleaver the size of a machete. Occasionally, Grandmother gifted us with a jar of homemade pickled vegetables, beautifully carved slices of carrot and daikon radish, and whole tiny onions, in a brine slightly spiked with fish sauce.

Xuan-An and Hai meanwhile worked two jobs each, for a while. Like many of the 1975 Vietnamese refugees, they spoke English well, although the children did not at first. All summer, we gave them lessons, and they started in the fall at grade level. The oldest daughter would eventually go on to college, while Xuan-An and Hai bought first a car, then a house of their own, in the neighborhood where they had lived as refugees. Later, their two sons would serve in the US Army.

In the early days, Xuan-An sometimes talked of going back to Vietnam, that it would be important for the children to remember their original language, in that case. I would look at Tao and know that Tao would not remember anything but growing up in America.

The Small Visitor

21. April 2026 · Comments Off on The Small Visitor · Categories: Domestic

It was still dark when I let the dog out this morning for a quick piddle. Yes, I may not have to be up before the crack of dawn these days – but Prince Fluff the Magnificent demands his chicken slurry lickable treat most mornings at about 6 AM and will loudly meow, paw the bedroom door and if in the bedroom – stomp heavily over the pillow until I get up and give it to him. Pulling the covers over my head does not work – he will only paw at the sheet and blankets and meow even louder. So – roll out, start the water for tea, measure out a scoop of Wagh Bakri International blend, open the lickable and squirt it out into Prince’s dish – and usually Benjamin the dog begins fussing at the door to be let out, by this time.

But this morning, when I opened the front door – which actually opens onto the narrow side yard of my house – I spotted something small, pale-furred and somewhat rodent-like scurrying briskly away. Benjamin paid only brief attention and didn’t chase after it – he really had to pee, I presume. The rodent-like thing moved off in the direction of the back yard and the empty field beyond. Not a field rat, or a skunk – both of which I have seen in my yard – but a juvenile opossum, about the size of a half-grown cat. And I have seen opossums in and around my yard; they move in a very distinct manner.

I am thinking that the opossum must have come to feast on the nectarines; they are ripe now and falling off the tree that I bought at Costco and planted by the front gate some years ago. This will be the second year that I have gotten a good showing of fruit from it, but alas, most of them are nibbled at by squirrels or knocked down by the wind before I can get much from them. Anyway, something has been eating the ripe and fallen fruit – so the only thing that really surprised me was that Benjamin didn’t have any interest in chasing it.

Then again – opossums do have teeth. Lots of them, and all very sharp. The cats who used to hang out in my back garden wisely didn’t have any problem with the large specimen whom I nicknamed Wellington (for the nose) who used to visit and nosh from the dish of dry kibble that I put out for them.

And then there were the four opossum kits who lived in the wisteria vine which had grown up over my back porch some years ago. One day when I was lying on the porch swing, reading a book, the kits climbed purposefully down the vine and one of them clambered up onto the end of the porch swing. I held very still, mostly because I wanted to see what it was going to do. What it wanted to do, apparently, was to hop up onto my lap and tentatively gum at a fold of my blouse, the edge of the book that I was reading, and at my fingers; not very hard, just sort of sampling for a taste, which apparently was not rewarded. Discovering that none of the above were in the least edible, the opossum kit climbed down again and vanished into the garden with the others. There may have been a double-dog-dare challenge invoked by one of the other kits. Anyway, when I related this encounter to my next-door neighbor, a retired civil servant some ten or fifteen years older than me, she confessed that if a ratty little creature with a bald tail and sharp little teeth had climbed up into her own lap, she would have been screaming still.

Anyway – they also eat garden slugs as well as fruit, so I’m actually rather glad to see them again.

This may be one of the kits, later – and all grown up

A Monumental Read

03. April 2026 · Comments Off on A Monumental Read · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

Left to myself when it comes to watching TV of an evening lately, I’ve rather amused myself by watching shows and series which bored my daughter, and unsettled Wee Jamie … the series Cadfael, for instance – appeared to give Jamie bad dreams for some unfathomable reason, so we switched to comic fare like Malcolm in the Middle and Home Improvement. Having watched the whole run of Downton Abbey, my next choice fell to the recent British produced miniseries of War & Peace. Yes, the series based on the interminable epic novel (epic meaning omigawd it’s long! Even longer than Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, or Prousts’ In Search of Lost Time).

The-then Soviets made an epic movie of the novel in the 1960s – and it was also an epic production, as national cultural pride was at stake! The resulting production took years of shooting, thousands of extras, and a fortune in costs; apparently entire museums were emptied of authentic bits and bobs in order to duplicate that period in Russian history. The movie eventually made it to American television – the Wikipedia article says that it aired in four parts in the late summer of 1972. A vision of historical splendor, even in black and white on a small screen. I thought it had aired a few months earlier, as I distinctly recall that I was still in high school when I watched it on TV, and I would have graduated by that time. Anyway – much enjoyed the Russian movie version, especially as every one of the cast were total unknowns to me, and so they were entirely subsumed into the characters that they played.

In fact, I enjoyed the movie so much that I willingly sat down and read the whole book, of my own free will – a not inconsiderable reading project for anyone. I confessed to skimming over the long philosophical discussions between characters; the family and societal dynamics, the sweep of historical events were all quite riveting enough. Although – when I watched some excerpts from the Russian movie version recently, I realized that the two male leads playing Pierre and Prince Andre were way too old for the roles they played. I see now that the actors in the more recent British series are much more age-appropriate. Pierre is supposed to be an earnest, slightly gullible nerd, and his best pal Prince Andre is the handsome yet troubled romantic. And Lily Allen was apparently the go-to ingenue actress when it came to doing flighty and silly young things. Anyway, aside from thinking some of the female costumes are a bit over the edge … really, a single-shoulder and sleeveless afternoon gown? Taking the ancient Greek fashion a bit too far? Well, the character wearing it is supposed to be …. Questionable in virtue and practically everything else so … looking forward to the rest of the series.

 

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