David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Beautiful Manhole Covers

Manhole covers are beautiful! If you don’t think so, you haven’t looked. Beneath our feet and tires, they tend to be beneath our notice. But many have geometrically pleasing, if not intricate designs. Take a walk in any urban and many suburban areas with a focus on the street and you’ll find art where you never expected. Just watch out for traffic.

Manhole covers are typically round caps that seal a man-sized entry to underground infrastructure so that the pipes and wires beneath the pavement can be examined and repaired. Round covers are most common since the shape prevents the lid from falling back into the hole. But manholes may be rectangular or square as well. Although they are too small to allow a person entry, the term manhole is also often used to describe openings to gas and traffic control structures.

For the Love of Turtles

All thoughts of a turtle are turtles.
–R. W. Emerson

Something about turtles draws a smile. A box turtle crossed my path at the wooded edge of a Hartford, Connecticut cemetery on a June morning last year and left me buoyant for days. We spent several minutes staring at each other. Its high domed shell with intricate art deco-like yellow patterning was stunning. Recalling the moment still makes me happy.

Turtles are the reptiles we love. However wrongly, most people I know fear snakes, and lizards are seen as a bit creepy. So what’s so special about their shelled relatives? Also cold blooded with small beady eyes and decidedly not cuddly, turtles still steal our hearts.

The oldest surviving reptiles, turtles lived with the earliest dinosaurs some 200 million years ago. There are about 300 species worldwide, with eight inland species here in southern New England. These egg laying animals are strong beaked and toothless. An armor-like shell is their trademark characteristic, and time has proved it a remarkable defense against predation of this slow and deliberate creature. Our native turtles have a life span comparable to human beings, with box turtles living up to a century.

Teaching Stones to Talk: A Craze for Cairns

You can teach a stone to talk. Pile one atop another and you have a cairn expressing an intention of its builder. It proclaims something to passers by. We only need to understand the dialect, a kind of geological sign language.

Cairns can take on a variety of forms from relatively shapeless piles to carefully articulated towers or pyramids. Individual stones can be stacked one on top of the other as simple markers or designed artistically with purposefully considered shapes and colors.

Cairns have been used to memorialize events or people, as property and political boundary monuments, as waste piles in early farm field clearing, or to mark a hiking trail. They can be decorative in gardens and landscaping. Sometimes they are built out of whimsy or as a spontaneous creative expression just because rocks are at hand.

Outside Art: Hunting for Murals

While walking downtown in Connecticut’s cities I’ve seen a whale, a long ago demolished factory, a twenty-foot tall violinist, and a cabin deep in the woods. The images weren’t alcohol or drug fueled mirages or caused by sleep deprivation. Sure, I was intoxicated, but with the colors and shapes of murals painted   on blank walls and building façades.

On Middletown’s Main Street not long ago after lunch at O’Rourke’s Diner, I stopped to smile at a brick building adjacent to Bob’s Auto Service. Between windows on a sidewall was the image of a man painting an uneven streak of yellow while supported on the shoulders of several other men as an amused woman gazed up at them. Just down the street at the corner of Glilletti Way was an even more elaborate mural. It featured bold striping and included people sitting at a table, a nearby bridge, sky, and a street scene. Entitled “Color Nourishment for All,” it was the work of artist Marela Zacarias sponsored by Wesleyan’ University’s Green Street Art Center. Fully nourished with color, I continued down the street discovering other pieces of public art I’d never noticed before.

Celebrating the Sun at Solstice

Remember the summer of 2017’s solar eclipse? On this day when we’ll enjoy the year’s least amount of light here in Collinsville, Connecticut—nine hours, eight minutes, and thirty-five seconds—it seems absurd, perverse even, to have celebrated the sun’s disappearance in mid afternoon, even for a just few moments. Winter begins tomorrow. I long to feel the sun’s warmth, to have it greet me on awakening, and to watch it languidly linger in the evening with a gaudy glow.

It’s hard now to imagine how profligately we spent August’s ripening warmth and lavish sunshine, as if summer were endless. Eclipse mania seemed to grip the country. For weeks the media heralded the sun’s brief retreat with scientific explanations, retellings of historic occurrences, and interviews with people traveling for the event or in the path of totality. Viewing glasses sold briskly and could not be had for love or money more than a week before the celestial show. Few were the conversations without eclipse talk.

Why Did the Person Cross the Footbridge?

It takes only a matter of a few steps to feel yourself bridging space and time. Footbridges make it literally possible. Our car culture seems to have inextricably linked the words “roads” and “bridges.” The spans that first come to mind are inevitably vehicle dominated, like San Francisco’s Golden Gate  and the George Washington that links New York and New Jersey. Smaller in scale, more humble as engineering feats, and with much less traffic than their automobile accommodating cousins, pedestrian spans are often little noticed or remembered. Nevertheless, there are more shoe leather crossings than you might expect, even within a place as small as my home state of Connecticut. They allow us to pass over natural and human-made spaces at a measured pace, enabling us to experience the full weight of time.

Some footbridges travel across both natural and built barriers. Willimantic hosts a 635-foot-long span that crosses sidewalks, vehicle traffic, an active railroad line, and a river. Said to be the only American bridge east of the Mississippi to cross all these obstacles, it’s composed of five steel truss spans. Built in 1906, it connects the commercial downtown with residential areas on the southern edge of the city.

Remembering a Little Known Soldier on Veterans Day

It’s not often that a cemetery is created in the place where a person drops dead. But such is the case with the grave of Sergeant Heman Baker, Jr. (sometimes rendered “Herman”) who died in an East Hartford, Connecticut farm field on January 21, 1777 at age 29. It’s a lone grave, but hardly lonely at the edge of Willow Street near a major entrance to the Pratt & Whitney factory complex. Surrounded by a low black pipe railing, there’s a standard marble military headstone at one end of the rectangular plot.

Baker was an American soldier before there was a United States of America. He died just about six months after independence was declared. I’ve visited his grave a few times, once on April 19 in memory of his service at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. His faith in his young country before it even thought of itself as a country is inspiriting. Despite vehicle noise and stark industrial surroundings so unlike the classic New England graveyard, I can find myself here in deep reverie. My next visit will be tomorrow, Veterans Day.

Paddling with Presidents

Surrounded by water, I sat where President Herbert Hoover once sat. Sounds like a surrealistic dream, but I was wide awake, perched in the bow of a canoe. The boat once belonged to U.S. Senator Frederic Walcott, a fishing buddy of Hoover. A “Whistle Wing” wood-and-canvas model made by the St. Lawrence Boat Works in upstate New York during the 1920s, it was a work of art with white cedar ribs and planking, and mahogany decking and gunwales.

On Norfolk, Connecticut’s Tobey Pond with my friend and consummate woodsman Jody Bronson guiding from the stern, I was intoxicated by the reflective water and wooded shore dotted with a few distinctive cottages. Once a wilderness paddler testing his mettle in the Canadian subarctic, a bad back had kept me out of canoes for many years. This fifteen minute flat water cruise was about my limit, but plenty long enough for memories to come flooding back. It was like falling in love for the first time all over again.