There's two things in the world you never want to let people see how you make 'em: laws and sausages.

Have I talked about The West Wing? I know I'm late to the party - like, ten years late, but I believe in making a fashionably tardy entrance. I've been watching the first season (in between writing up a storm of personal statements for grad school and battling the actual snow storm outside my house) and holy crap, that was an amazing show.

Aaron Sorkin is sort of a sore spot for a lot of TV enthusiasts. It seems like either you love him and think he's God's gift to television or you hate him and wish he would die in a fire. And preferably take his too-witty fast-walking characters with him. But I've always sort of viewed myself as a swing-vote when it comes to Sorkin: I hated Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip but I thought Sports Night was probably the most underappreciated tv show of the last 15 years (and given that that year-span includes Veronica Mars, that's saying something) Clearly, I have unresolved issues. But people, West Wing... it's a revelation.

I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised. I mean, this is a tv show about the United States! And government! And smart people! Those are three things I adore! And the writing itself is so unapologetically in love with the idea of America, so optimistic about what American government could do, the positive agent of change it could be... I'm getting all verklempt just thinking about it. It's sort of strange to watch it now with 8 years of the Bush administration under my belt, but I'm also noticing a lot of overlaps between the Obama administration and the rocky start of the fictional Bartlet government.

Mostly I think I love The West Wing because it's just so ridiculously nerdy, and completely willing to revel in that fact. To wit, I leave you with the Antiquities Act (my fave!), a banking bill, and a fictional American president waxing rhapsodic over the great insitution of America's national parks*:





*I love the national parks too! Come hang out with me, President Bartlet... we can drink tea and I'll tell you all about Grey Towers! It'll be awesome.

One man's trash is another man's castle, one man's castle is another man's outrageously-decorated monstrosity

I'm feeling a little weird about the fact that I'm leaving Milford in less than a week; I'm exciting to be heading home (my big bed! my lovely sheets! cable! INTERNET!) but also sad to be leaving Grey Towers (my rustic farmhouse! work I really love! old objects!) and I am really, truly, wholeheartedly terrified about not having a job. So, because my whole brain is consumed by this mixture of excitement, wistfulness, and full-fledged panic, I don't have many words to spare for this blog post. What I do have, though, are pictures!

This post has been a long time coming. How can I write about Grey Towers if I never post a single picture of the building? So here it is, in all its goofy, fake-castle-y glory.


Of course, I've written about the turrets - I've even, dare I say it, waxed poetic about them. But what about the interiors, say you? Well, Grey Towers is used by the Forest Service as both a museum and meeting center for conservation conferences, so its multiple floors are put to multiple uses. The first floor is made up of the historic museum rooms and offices (in the servants' wing, of course), and the second and third floors are conference rooms and more offices. The interesting rooms, therefore, are all on the first floor, and that's what I have pictures of. My office is actually on the third floor, tucked under the eaves, but while it sounds super-romantic that mostly means that I occasionally hit my head on the sloping ceiling.

But anyway, the interior! When you enter the house from the front door (which we never do... staff/servants' entrance, dontchya' know) you step into the great hall, a huge wood-paneled room filled with heavy Dutch and Italian Renaissance furniture. It is very, very dark. The most interesting part of the great hall is the inglenook, which sits to the left of the main entrance. Here it is:


Like I said, dark. Also, yes, that is a stuffed owl clutching a stuffed squirrel in its sharp little claws. It is pretty strange. On either side of the owl are stag heads mounted to the walls. Here is the one to the right of the owl (who I call Hooty, of course):


I can't tell you much about the sailor's cap, except that it is entirely historically accurate. The restoration, done in the 1990s, used historic photos to recreate the furnishings and look of every room. Every historic photo of the great hall dating back to the early 1920s showed the sailor's cap sitting on top of the stag's antlers. We don't know how it got there, but I like to think of it as further proof of the fact that Cornelia Pinchot was a hilariously tacky but amazing decorator.

The library is probably my favorite room. You enter it from a door on the right wall of the great hall. Originally two very small rooms (a billiards room for the gentlemen and a sitting room for the ladies), Cornelia tore out the wall between the rooms when she married Gifford and paneled the walls in wooden bookshelves to make it a library. Here is the part of the room that used to be the ladies' sitting room:


We have a number of lovely empire sofas in the house, but this one is my favorite - the arm rests are high enough that it almost feels like a box.

Across from the sofa is a huge painting of Mary Pinchot, Gifford's mother, sitting with Gifford and his little sister Antoinette. He had another sister, Lucy, who died as a baby and a younger brother, Amos, who wasn't yet born when the portrait was painted. I consider the official family painting that is missing Amos to be further proof that Amos was really the black sheep of the family. Certainly Gifford got the better house and furnishings, and even though Amos was quite accomplished (he founded an organization that was the precursor to the ACLU, and was a noted lawyer who worked for equal rights and fought to free Sacco and Vanzetti, among others) the whole family clearly had the highest hopes for Gifford. My housemate Shannon and I would often hear something really complimentary about Gifford and say to each other, "sucks to be Amos, though." Anyway, the painting was done in Europe and cost $12,000 which is more than half of what the entire house took to build.


There is a door to the right of this photo that leads to the sitting room. The sitting room is arguably Cornelia's greatest contribution to the house (or at least the interior of the house - she was also responsible for the entire landscaping project, as well as the addition of multiple outbuildings to the property) and you can get a good sense of her design aesthetic from a look at the sitting room:


And by "design aesthetic," I mean "her way of throwing crazy colors on the walls and stuffing a room full of mismatched furniture and calling it "decorated."" I mean, really, this woman was AWESOME. I can sort of imagine her stomping through the house, a team of assistants behind her coughing as they inhaled the smoke trailing from her thin french cigarette as she claimed in her patrician voice, "Nooooo, sea green walls are nothing without red velvet drapes and some lovely fake marble trim! Nothing, I tell you! Have you no imagination? No joie de vivre? You must think of this house as a caterpillar, and we are the chrysalis process that will turn it into a beautiful butterfly! Be the chrysalis!!" Or something to that effect.

The large expanses of walls in the sitting room not covered with mirrors, candelabras, or mounted fish are papered with huge murals of Dutch seascapes and farm scenes. The murals were painted onto canvases which were then plastered like wallpaper onto the walls. Cornelia found the paintings in the Hague and insisted that they be brought over to line her sitting room walls, completing the maritime theme she had going. When the Forest Service took over the house in 1963 they claimed that most of the paintings were too damaged to restore, so they just painted over them. I've since heard conflicting stories (that the Forest Service just didn't want to pay for them to be fixed, or that they didn't feel they were appropriate for the house, etc.) but whatever the reason, most of the paintings had to be re-created for the restoration. One wall was saved, though, and the mural on it is original:


So those are the three main historic rooms. There is also Gifford's office, which sits in one of the towers off the corner of the library - I mention it because it has one of my favorite pieces in it, a lovely and strangely delicate Federal-style desk. Also, the wallpaper is goofy:


Gifford's bedroom is the only historic room on the second floor, but I couldn't be bothered to document it. It is a small tower room, and his bed is bizarrely little, especially when you consider that he never lived there as a child. He and Cornelia had separate rooms, as was the style of the times, but still... weirdly tiny bed.

So yeah, that is the interior of Grey Towers! I guess I had more to say than I thought, but hopefully the photographs made up for my senseless babbling.

I'm leaving Milford in six days, so if you're in the SF Bay Area and want to see me, I'm home November 7! Otherwise, stay tuned - I'll try to post some more before I leave.

Im in ur forestz, preventing ur firez

Fun fact: Smokey Bear, contrary to what many of us were taught during Junior Ranger activities at national parks during family camping trips*, is NOT a creation of of the National Park Service but rather of the Forest Service. Smokey was created as a public service mascot on August 9, 1944 (his birthday!) and was eventually physically embodied by a black bear that was rescued from a fire in 1950. He is actually the longest running public service campaign in American history. Take that, Scruff McGruff.

Second fun fact: Smokey Bear's name is Smokey Bear - there is no "the" in it. Funny, right?

Third fun fact: at sites like Grey Towers, where a lot of what goes on is conservation education for both adults AND children, the Forest Service often supplies a "Smokey Suit" to create a real-life Smokey for activities. And sometimes, miracles happen and interns are required to wear the suit. See below for proof:

Smokey, yes?


But who can that be animating our one true forest protector?


WHY YES I DID GET TO DRESS UP AS SMOKEY BEAR AND PLAY WITH FOUR-YEAR-OLD KIDS. YES IT WAS AWESOME, WHY DO YOU ASK?

Of course, I couldn't move my head with the head-part on and I couldn't see through the eyes so I had to be led around by another ranger, but still, it was quite possibly the most awesome thing ever.

*Don't lie, I know at least some of you did junior rangers; if your last name is Resnikoff, it was practically a right of passage. Endless campfire activities with some goofy chipper Ranger learning to identify bird calls and practicing your safe-camping rules. Good times, mosquito bites and all.

Baby, you can drive my car (except you can't, because it is government property)

So the nice folks here at Grey Towers have been utterly fooled by my suspiciously capable attitude toward cars and have actually decided to let me operate government vehicles. Crazy, right? And I even told them about the time I hit the $90,000 Mercedes two hours after I had gotten my license and they weren't fazed! I didn't, however, mention my talent at bursting tires - that seemed like a discussion for a later time.

Still, yesterday I was tooling around back and forth from the mansion to the archives storage in a snazzy Jeep Patriot (and have you ever heard of a more jingoistic car? Why don't they just call it the Jeep "I love America more than you, pinko commie terrorist!"?), and I felt very powerful, and also a little like The Man. I had my uniform on, my big government SUV even had the Forest Service seal on it, and I had keys jangling at my hip that could unlock every door in the park. And a radio! It doesn't get more The Man than that.*

I kept hoping to come along some kids graffitti-ing something so I could park my truck, slowly get out, and saunter coolly over to them, all the while peering out menacingly over the rim of my aviators. And then I'd say authoritatively, "you kids know you're messing with government property, which is a felony?" Of course, I don't know if it is or isn't (I'm thinking isn't), and of course I couldn't speak authoritatively to a chipmunk, much less a human being, so this is where the fantasy starts to fall apart.

I don't think I'm actually cut out to be The Man, if only because my 1960's counter-revolutionary high school teachers would be appalled. Still, the car is pretty neat.

*Okay, so a gun would have helped the image, but no one here would be stupid enough to entrust me with fire arms.

Coming soon to a tv set near you

So today I might, just might have been scanning photos of Gifford Pinchot and his various forestry activities for a noted public television documentarian. Yes, that noted public television documentarian.* Who is doing a documentary on the national parks. And needs photographs. Of Gifford Pinchot. Photographs scanned by me. I'M FAMOUS.

No, but really, I'm inordinantly excited by my brush with intellectual-Americana fame. When you see the national parks documentary on PBS (and I know you will, you Teddy Roosevelt fans) just remember me and my tiny insignificant role in bringing it to your television set.

*You know who I'm talking about: he directed The Civil War, and Jazz, and Baseball, and The War, and is the king of PBS.

Down home on the farm

As I've mentioned before, Grey Towers is located in the cute little hamlet of Milford, PA. I don't think I've ever lived anywhere so charming, and having been in both North Berkeley and Decatur, GA, I think that is saying something. But really, this place is amazing. Beautiful historic houses, shady streets, friendly neighbors... the works. What makes it even better, though, is that it isn't all gingerbread trim and well-groomed lawns. Yeah, there are a lot of summer residents who raise the value of the property and bring things like organic free-range eggs and absurdly expensive restaurants to town, but there are enough locals with dirty pickups living in crumbling Victorians with Mets flags outside to make the town feel real and alive. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to take pictures of all the buildings and neighborhoods (all 1 and 1/2 of them) that I love, but here is a preview:


Cute sign, right? Also, the town was officially founded twenty years after America declared independence. I'm not sure, but I think that might make it the oldest place I've ever lived.

While I do not have pictures of Milford just yet, I do have a couple of Grey Towers and my farmhouse. Here is Grey Towers from the path that winds from the parking pavilion to the house. (To get from my house to the mansion, I trample through the woods until I hit the pavilion, and then I join the footpath and make my way up. It is a pretty easy commute, but sometimes the traffic gets ugly when the squirrels start going at it.)


The angle of the picture keeps you from seeing it, but that ivy covers the wall that forms the moat. Yes, Grey Towers has a moat. It doesn't go all the way around the house, unfortunately, but still... a moat! Also, that weird brown blob in the middle of the second story is a bust of Lafayette. The Pinchot's were French - Gifford's grandfather and great-grandfather were huge supporters of Napoleon who got out while the going was good once they saw that the Bourbons were going to be restored. The design of Grey Towers is actually based on Lafayette's chateau, Le Grange.

As to why it is called Grey Towers, find out for yourself:


WHY YES, WE DO HAVE TURRETS. My favorite architectural feature EVER, probably due to too many viewings of Beauty and the Beast as a young child. The third floor tower room is right near my office, and when I need to do some reading, (you know, like a historic structure report, or the historic furnishings list, or maybe a complete account EVERY item Cornelia Pinchot ever purchased - your usual light entertainment reading) I like to hide out up there in the big easy chair. I've only nodded off once.

When I'm not vacuuming historic furnishings or reading old receipts in a turret, I spend my free time in the farmhouse on the property. It is apparently the oldest structure still standing in the park, and it predates Grey Towers by a good fifty+ years. It isn't worth taking pictures of the inside, which was gutted 20 years ago and re-done in industrial-housing chic, but the outside is pretty great.


Here is the large porch. The window on the left is my bedroom window, and to the right is the kitchen. My housemate Shannon has the upstairs bedroom.

And here is the side that you see (sort of) when you come up the road:


And this is my BACKYARD:


The creek runs right behind the house, and for the first couple days I always thought it was raining outside because of the noise.

Finally, I want you to meet the newest resident of the farmhouse, Sadie:


Sadie is shiny and red. Sadie is beautiful. Sadie is also a piece of crap bicycle. But she's MY piece of crap bicycle, and considering that I walked five miles to the closest Wal-Mart to buy her, I'm feeling pretty attached. Which is actually a shame, given that she doesn't seem too attached to me. Or at least that is what her unwillingness to shift gears and tendancy to try to throw me off of her rocking seat when we go over the smallest bump seems to say. Still, old men always compliment me on my "neat ride" when I take her into town, so I guess there is a silver lining to the bicycle debacle.

Shoshana vs.The Insects, round one

Old houses set into expansive well-manicured grounds surrounded by rolling hills and verdant forests attract a lot of things. Retirees, school-children, antiquers, minivans, the fanny-packed: these are all examples of the types of creatures who are drawn inside of Grey Towers by the allure of old furniture, older stone, and the chance to look at a rich man's water closet. But do you know what else is attracted to old houses? BUGS. All that delicious wood and textiles, the lovely nooks and crannies that are just perfect for setting up a webbed house, the dark hulking furniture and hugeness of the structure, the fabulous damp that rises up through the flagstones; these and more are all good reasons for the creepy-crawlies of the world to migrate to Grey Towers and play house. A large portion of historic housekeeping and preventative conservation is battling bugs. Today, I was on the front lines.

My first skirmish was with two spiders I found lurking in the fireplace of the Great Hall. Large and thin, they were hiding out under the grate. I went at them with a plastic cup and a peice of Grey Towers paper paraphanalia (all I had near me at the time, and time was of the essence so I couldn't run to get better equipment.) Fittingly, the newsletter was about invasive bug species in the area. Unfortunately, I wasn't fast enough, and one got away completely while the other crawled to an area I couldn't get at.

Then there was the large beetle-like creature that scurried past me on my way to the visitors desk to drop off the bug-catching materials I had borrowed from them. I yelped when I saw it and dove to get the little bugger, but he was too fast. I was disappointed, but reminded myself that he was on the visitor's office side of the carpet and thus technically not crossing the border into historic room territory, where he could do real damange.

My final encounter was with a moth, who was fluttering weakly on the old oak staircase leading from the Great Hall to the second floor. As his wings flapped lethargicallyI saw my opportunity and pounced, catching him in the plastic-cup-grave I had intended for the spiders. Feeling accomplished but strangely sad (I suppose I feel some sympathy for my fallen enemies), I carried him up to the curatorial office on the third floor for my boss to see.

So, here is the count: Bugs-2, Shoshana-1. But never fear... they'll be dropping like flies (pun!) on Friday when I bring out the VACUUM.

In other animal notes: I saw a black bear yesterday! He scampered across the parking lot in front of the curatorial storage building while I sat in the government SUV next to my boss, who pointed and yelled, "BEAR!" It was probably the highlight of my day.

And the job begins

This morning I started my first real curatorial/historic-upkeep job, by dusting. Yes, dusting. Still, dusting is important to historic collections. In fact, it can be argued that regular cleaning can do more to preserve historic objects than any preservation attempt made after the damage. I dusted in the Great Hall, the main entrance to the house and the room that is probably most prone to dust. The dangerous combination of visitors tromping in and out (and touching things they shouldn't and adjusting knick-knacks AND SITTING ON THE ANTIQUE CHIPPENDALES, arrgghh!) and heavy dark wood furniture that shows everything means that it requires the most work. It was surprisingly fun - working my way around the very valuable furniture. duster in gloved hand, being extra careful and precise so as not to damage anything. I felt like I was doing Important Work, when really I'm just a glorified housekeeper.

I imagine that it will become boring after a while, though, even if I only have to dust and swiffer every couple days, so I have taken to naming the furniture I work on. So far I have Balthazar (a big 19th century European chest/hutch thing, hulking and intricately carved), Armando (named so because he is an armoire of sorts, matching in style to Balthazar) and the Bobbsy Twins (two elaborate throne chairs with velvet upholstery and faces of important historical figures carved into the wood around the back. ) I'm still working on a name for a blue-green painted cabinet brought back from the South Pacific in the 1920s, so any suggestions would be welcome.

My girl Cornelia

I'm spending the next three months working as a curatorial intern at Grey Towers, a national historic site in Milford, PA. Grey Towers was the summer home and personal headquarters for Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service and twice-elected governor of PA. You'll be hearing a lot about old Giff and his lovely home (and it is truly lovely) from me over the next three months, but for now I want to talk about my newest best friend: Gifford's wife, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot.

Cornelia Bryce was the type of girl people (generally old genial grandfathers with pipes and smoking jackets, at least in my imagination) would have referred to as a "firecracker" one hundred years ago. They would have said, gleefully yet still patronizingly, that she had "moxie." I'm free, however, to call her what she was: one bad-ass lady on a mission.

Born in 1881 during a time when women were elevated on pedestals of purity even as they were denied basic democratic rights, she resented her parents for denying her an education, talked politics and smoked cigars with the men, and refused to marry until she was 33. She was also a suffragette - on Friday my job was to sort through and scan old photographs of Cornelia, and one of my favorites is her at the front of an army of women carrying American flags and signs reading "Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association."

When she finally did marry it was to Gifford Pinchot, a man 15 years her senior who respected her intelligence and was more than happy to let her use their collective wealth (a great deal of it hers) to further her political and social goals. And further them she did. She campaigned heavily for her husband when he ran for governor, and as first lady of Pennsylvania she got involved in policy issues concerning child labor and sweatshops. In fact, during Pinchot's second term as governor (interrupted by a break because in PA governors were banned from succeeding themselves) she even traveled to New York to take part in a labor strike against a factory that refused to let its employees (mostly women and children) unionize.

Cornelia wasn't nearly as successful as she was enthusiastic. She ran for Congress twice, losing both times both because she was a woman but also because her campaign was more idealistic than it was political savvy. Still, a lady representative in 1925ish? Awesome. She also founded her own free experimental school for Pennsylvania's children, adamantly campaigned for child labor laws, and was the tackiest interior decorator ever. The majority of the Grey Tower interiors that we have conserved (or reconstructed to the best of our ability) in the house are interiors that she designed when she moved in, and man, are they silly. Every time I walk past the painted-marble treatment on the walls of the sitting room or duck under one of the enormous elk heads that she mounted at the entry, I giggle and imagine Cornelia crying out at the movers or painters in her posh East Coast accent, "NO, I want them to look MORE noble, more impressive - make them appear HUGE!" And then she probably kicked them out of the house in frustration and just did the job herself. She was delightfully tacky, and her heavy-handed approach to interior design pops up unrepentantly throughout the house.

So, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot. Feminist, rabble-rouser, unapologetically brash and unsubtle, and my favorite thing about Grey Towers (so far.)

I attempt to keep up with technology, even amidst the panic of packing

See Shoshi move. See Shoshi freak out about packing. Pack, Shoshi, pack! See Shoshi worry about packing too much, and then panic at the thought of only bringing one pair of boots. See Shoshi start an internship in the glorious backcountry of Pennsylvania. Cling to your guns and your religion, Shoshi!

See Shoshi video-blog: