Capers With Carroll

The Westmont College website has photographs of damage from the fire that raced through campus last Thursday evening. Few colleges offer the kind of beauty that Westmont does, nestled in the oak-covered hills of Montecito. I first visited Westmont when my daughter Aileen was a high school student trying to settle on a university. She did not submit a backup application to any other institution.

The downside of that beauty is a vulnerability to the windswept flames that almost yearly burn somewhere in Southern California. This fire approached from the woods north of campus and cut through Clark Residence Halls (a collection of 17 separate buildings: Aileen roomed there 1995-97). It took some parts of Clark and spared others. Then it descended through the center of campus by way of the wooded strips that make Westmont so distinctive. Flames destroyed math and physics buildings that had already been marked for demolition, the psychology building, and over a dozen faculty homes, but no one was hurt.

I last visited the Westmont campus in December. Aileen and Eduardo held their wedding in Santa Barbara and we used Westmont as a backdrop for their wedding photographs. We took most of our pictures in the formal gardens that stretch downhill from Kerrwood Hall.

The gardens mostly survived, though the fire took the woods in the right side of this view. Aileen also wanted pictures outside the small white chapel that is flanked on both sides by oak groves, and then a playful series with Aileen and Eduardo playing peek-a-boo around the trunk of a nearby giant.

The Westmont website pictures show that while the groves on both sides are cinders, the chapel still stands, and the peek-a-boo tree looks scorched, but alive. In fact, that’s a pretty good summary of the 47 photos in the series: Westmont is scorched but alive.

Flying into Hangzhou, I was fascinated by the pattern created by apartment buildings lining the streets and canals, separated by wide fields of carefully striped fields of vegetables. I don't think I have seen anything like it in all my travels, though I was being a good boy and didn't power up my camera during landing.


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Once on the ground, I was even more impressed with a style of architecture seen throughout the suburbs. The buildings that form the hedges around these gardens are four or five stories tall with a square footprint, and stairs rather than elevators (there's a reason these people are all slim). Many of these buildings are topped off with ornate metal towers, some a series of techno-looking spheres, others resembling the Eiffel Tower, or the adornments on a Russian Orthodox Church. At first I thought they might be antennas or even merely decorative. But the week before my trip, I had been discussing Benjamin Franklin and his inventions with my 8th grade students.

I happened to be riding with a high-level executive of a building-materials company.
"What is the purpose of those tall towers?" I asked.
The answer: "For protection from lightning."

Franklin has been one of my heroes since I read his biography in third grade. I can testify that his work is still pretty popular in Hangzhou, as well.

Cleaning out the swimming pool just now, I spotted this lady atop an oak twig.

I'm assuming she's a Geolycosa sp., just based on her size (big), but if someone knows better, please correct me. This time of year, I see many of these drowned in the pool, or collected in the filter. I managed to role the twig over once maneuvering for this shot, so she's just come out of the water, ready for a wet t-shirt contest.

It is housekeeping day here at Capers, having been out of town for four out of the last five weekends and a full half of the weekends since my last post (Aug. 28). I have not gone ten postless weeks for lack of something to say. These were the ten final weeks of the most interesting (albeit frustrating) election of my lifetime. As theater I give it five stars. The same ten weeks also saw an economic ("collapse?" "adjustment?" Choose one.) that I have been expecting since the late 1970s.

However, in August I began a new and strenuous teaching assignment. There’s something about teaching middle school, having to be constantly up for a straight eight hours, that leads to collapse when the kids go home. It’s hard to get much done in the evenings, even to grade papers. I’m also studying for an upcoming exit exam for my master’s program. Then, in October, I married off two of my sons. One of those weddings took us to China for seven days. (More on the weddings when I can sit here a little longer.)

So today I am tidying up. Wednesday I removed the McCain/Palin and “Vote Pro-Life” posters from my front yard. Vandals had relieved me of some of my task. I understand a local high school teacher gave extra credit points as a bounty for students to bring in the campaign posters of those on the Left’s blacklist. Had I done the same for my side, I would have been suspended without pay. What are we teaching our children?

Today, I am taking down the McCain poster (I never had time to change it to McCain Palin after the convention) that I’ve had in my sidebar since the California primary (where it replaced the Huckabee poster I hung up in January). It’s part of making my transition from McCain Partisan to Obama’s Loyal Opposition. He will be my president, and I want him to be successful. A failure for any president is also a failure for the whole country. I am committed to speak ill only of his policies, and not his person. I am committed to representing him in the best light possible to my middle school students. I am committed to pray that God will grant him wisdom and stamina. However, where he has made unfortunate promises to interest groups, I will pray that he has the fortitude to stand up to them and explain that their desires are not in the best interests of the country.

I must admit, I am only a short way into the grieving process. Obama’s election has been bitter for me to accept. Every vote I have cast since 1980 has been animated by my opposition to legalized abortion. Yet this election moves America’s most extreme pro-abortion voting record from the Senate to the White House. I fear the incremental Pro-life gains accomplished in 28 years and in all 50 states will be entirely lost even before the next mid-term elections. Obama has promised to do just that. I fear the coming Supreme Court will deliver disaster upon disaster throughout the rest of my life. Conditions will require a whole new level of commitment from those of us in the Pro-Life Movement. And yet, our own internal ethic refuses to allow us the kind of reactions displayed now by those who stole my lawn signs and who will seek once again to overturn a clear vote by the people. Somehow, when the same left-leaning voters who gave Obama a 60.9% statewide majority also vote to join the unanimous chorus of all 30 states whose citizens have ever voted on a definition of marriage, those in the streets try to insist that it is the majority which is out step with the mainstream. Go figure.

So I am mowing the lawn, sweeping out the pool, sorting the laundry, and getting ready to cull from among the 700 photographs I took in China.

If you watch carefully, a few of the keepers might even show up here