Category Archives: real life

Wikimedia Privacy & You

Posted on by
Privacy

photo: SparkCBC, creative commons license

What is privacy in an era of NSA mega-sweeps, email hacking, and rampant security breaches? Sure, companies all have privacy policies, full of boilerplate, but what do they mean in practice?  The recent Wikimedia Foundation transparency report shines a light on one tiny piece of our potentially massive digital persona. If you use Wikimedia often, as I do, you may realize that it keeps some non-public user-identifiable information. Law enforcement and security agencies may be interested in those data.

Sometimes I joke about this, because, as a writer of crime thrillers, my history of searches would be highly suspicious. It has happened to writers, and  here’s a case where a Long Island family’s Google searches got them into trouble. UK’s Daily Mail has published a looooong list of search keywords and phrases of supposed interest to the Department of Homeland Security. Examples of suspect words: exercise (which I use mainly in the context of “I should get more”), prevention, organized crime (oops! a biggie for me), sick, smart. With such a “broad, vague, and ambiguous list,” as the Electronic Privacy Information Center termed it, adding Wikimedia searches to the data would generate a bazillion hits.

Wikimedia’s Privacy Practices

Wikimedia’s transparency report for the six-month period July to December 2015 is therefore a welcome peek behind the privacy curtain. It receives requests for user data from government, individuals, and corporations, but doesn’t collect much non-public data or retain it for long, so often does not even have what people want. Case closed. But when it does, it will notify you before disclosing any information and may even assist you in fighting “invalid requests.”

Between July and December 2015, Wikimedia received 25 user data requests, 14 of which were from non-government entities. It produced the requested information for only one of them—in response to a court order from France, affecting one user account. This is of course a vanishingly small number of requests compared to what Facebook or Google receive.

Wikimedia also sometimes discloses information to the authorities on its own initiative. That happened a dozen times in the same six-month time period. For example, it alerted authorities to a bomb threat originating from an IP address physically near the target site (an arrest and confession followed);  reported a detailed threat against President Obama; and disclosed a credible suicide threat, with another positive outcome.

The Internet Never (?) Forgets

Also in that period, Wikimedia received 220 legal requests to alter content or remove information, granting none of them. It encourages complainers to work with the community to rectify what they perceive as errors or inaccuracies.

You may know about “Right To Be Forgotten” (RTBF) efforts, authorized under a 2014 European court decision involving Google Spain. Wikimedia opposes this movement, and tends not to grant RTBF requests, though people may do a workaround, by having Wikipedia links removed from search engines. (Here’s an example.)

Dig Deeper

Although Wikimedia’s efforts are a tiny finger in the dike, its commitment to privacy and to letting users know it, is laudable. Read more on this topic:

privacy

graphic: Bernard Goldbach, creative commons license

Igniting the American Revolution

Posted on by
Washington_Crossing_the_Delaware_by_Emanuel_Leutze

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze

The David Library of the American Revolution is a history gem, just up the road from Washington Crossing (yes, THAT Washington Crossing) Historic Park in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. As a preamble to July 4, last Saturday historian Derek W. Beck gave a lively talk about “the war before the war”—the goings-on in Massachusetts before the Declaration of Independence, before the formation of the Continental Army, and in the earliest days of George Washington’s command.

Paul Revere

photo: Kathy, creative commons license

Beck tries to present both sides of the conflict and in his efforts exposes certain myths that arise when historians wear partisan blinders. Would Paul Revere have ridden through the countryside hollering, “The British are coming, the British are coming!”? Not likely, Beck says. If he did, he’d be greeted by puzzled looks and scratching heads, because practically everyone considered themselves to be British. They didn’t necessarily want independence from England (yet); they just wanted to be treated like any other British citizen. But in our mythologized history, with the clarity of hindsight, we know who the enemy was, and we name him.

Another example is “the shot heard round the world”—the first gunshot of the Revolution, traditionally fired at Lexington, Massachusetts. Who fired it? In the verse by Ralph Waldo Emerson,

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

It was to the Americans’ advantage to be the aggrieved parties, the victims, so preferred the view that the British fired first. However, Beck says, forensic evidence suggests that the very first shot wasn’t fired by either an American militia member or a British soldier, but a bystander outside a pub. (Figures.)

Beck considers it a plus that his two books (Igniting the American Revolution and The War Before Independence) are said to “read like action novels,” and he consigns the documentation that ordinarily fills history books to a thorough set of notes at the end. Such details are of vital interest to historians but make books much less interesting to those of us who merely want to gain a better understanding of our country’s past and establish a stronger connection to it.

Noble train, Henry Knox, Ft. Ticonderoga

The Noble Train of Artillery

Another myth he debunked was the one in which poor General Henry Knox struggled through heavy snows with the cannon from Fort Ticonderoga (“the noble train of artillery”). Histories (and many artworks) commemorating this episode depict them being pulled by oxen. Indeed, that was Knox’s plan. However, the farmer who owned the oxen so inflated their price, that at the last minute, he used horses instead, and he wrote about the change in his diary at the time.

Beck’s insights were informative, entertaining, and memorable, just as history ought to be!

A Zoo at Night!

Posted on by

owl, zooWhile it may be hard to tear the kids away from the amusement park rides and midway attractions at Hershey Park, near Harrisburg, Penna., don’t overlook ZooAmerica’s adjacent North American Wildlife Park. Originally the zoo had larger acreage and a comprehensive collection of world animals, but styles of zookeeping have changed a lot since Milton Hershey first thought of a zoo to house animals presented to him as gifts.

With the amusement park expanding and the animals needing more space, more tailored care, and more programs suited to keep them both physically and mentally healthy, a more focused program made sense. The downsizing of the zoo has let the staff concentrate on much more completely on comprehensive animal welfare. And North America has a lot!

You can visit the zoo during the day directly from within Hersey Park or do just the zoo (separate entrance). You can also participate in by-reservation-only early morning or evening behind-the scenes tours. There are also special tours for photographers. Because we were traveling with three children, the likelihood of mobilizing everyone early enough for the morning program seemed unlikely—and kind of anti-vacation—so we chose the after-dark tour. Good choice!

The After-Hours Tour

Two zookeepers accompanied our group of six and one other couple and showed us much the regular visitor does not see. The wolves were howling as we followed the zoo’s paths guided only by flashlights. The zookeepers knew, of course, which species and individuals were likely to be active at night. They showed us where the animals’ food is prepared, explained what goes into each different diet, and we saw where they are cared for if they are sick—if they need surgery, they go to the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center (just like you or me), to be operated on by a team of veterinarians (not).

Hershey bearWe fed river otters, a sloe-eyed alligator, and a huge tortoise. In the education center, we “petted” a baby alligator and held a young owl. That was quite a thrill! The highlight was the opportunity to hand-feed bears (grapes on a skewer held through the bars), which the bears delicately removed. These real-life Hershey bears—outdoors in daytime—come into their cages to sleep at night, so kids and bears had bars between them, plus, of course, seven hovering adults to make sure little fingers stayed well away. These were black bears so he isn’t terribly visible in the photo.

The zoo staff was terrific about explaining animal behavior. They obviously delighted in the children’s—and adults’—fascination with their work. These days, would-be zookeepers generally follow one of two main educational pathways: zoology, as you would expect, and psychology. Modern zookeeping emphasizes creating interesting environments and novel challenges for captive animals.

An unforgettable experience!

Your Travel Circles

I provide this information to help you make the most of your trips to “destination cities” by also seeing attractions in a reasonable driving distance. I’ve had too many business trips when I never got out of the meeting hotel!

  • If you’re visiting Harrisburg, Hershey is less than a half-hour (14.5 miles) away.

If you’re visiting Philadelphia, Hershey is less than two hours (95 miles) away.

****The Cartel

Posted on by
Mexico, drug cartels

(graphic by Christopher Dombres, creative commons license)

By Don Winslow, read by Ray Porter – Is there anyone who still thinks a little illegal drug use is a victimless crime? Who thinks the American “war on drugs” is actually accomplishing anything other than creating vast, lucrative criminal enterprises? Don Winslow’s much-publicized new thriller about the Mexican drug cartels will cure any such addictions to fantasy.

It’s clear that Winslow wanted to write an important book, possibly even a consequential one, and main character U.S. DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) agent Art Keller occasionally climbs on his soap box to tell us how bad things are. Those speeches are hardly necessary after the author’s detailing of the mayhem resulting from the turf wars between the Mexican drug cartels of 2004 to 2012 and the repeated U.S. missteps in fighting them. American initiatives have been undermanned, outgunned, and overconfident. Time and again, they have underestimated the strength and determination of their foes and the extent of their penetration in the highest levels of the military, the police, and the government.

At the opening of Winslow’s novel, Keller has retired from the DEA and lives incognito as a bee-keeper at a southern California monastery. Still he’s intrigued when his old boss tells him Adan Barrera—Keller’s arch-enemy imprisoned near San Diego—has started to talk. Barrera is the mastermind of the Sinaloa drug cartel, and one of his conditions for providing information is that he be transferred to a prison in Mexico. The Americans agree.

In the Mexican prison, Barrera lives like a king and before long escapes, pulling Keller into a frustrating and labyrinthine pursuit. (If you’ve read about the IRL escape last July of Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin Guzman Lorea from Mexico’s only super-max prison, via a tunnel lit by fluorescent lights, provided with fresh air, and containing metal tracks for a small rail-car pulled by a motorcycle—a down-market version of the supertunnels the cartels use to smuggle drugs into the United States—this fictional escape is perfectly believable.)

When Barrera puts up a $2 million reward for Keller’s murder, the ex-DEA man is forced back into the arms of his former employer, and the hunt for Barrera, begun in his previous book, The Power of the Dog, renews. But there are distractions as the war intensifies among the cartels, each trying to control territory and the transit of drugs—cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana, heroin. It’s at this point that the “innocence” of smoking a little pot or doing a few lines of coke breaks down. Because the market for drugs currently illegal in the United States and Europe makes the profits so high, people can and do torture, burn, dismember, behead, rape, and murder their competitors and many innocent civilians to maintain those profits. Every day, day after day.

With Winslow’s book, you have 640 pages of torture, burning, dismemberment. You have the cooperating police and complicit Mexican army, the corrupt politicians, the pre-teen killers, the squads of sicarios (assassins), the brazen narcotraficantes, the intimidated officials, the killers who leave a Jack of Spades on each corpse. And, in all this, you must consider U.S. complicity both directly and indirectly—by our behavior and by deploying a drug policy that produces so much collateral damage.

Mexico, drug cartels

“Silence Makes Me Furious” (photo: Knight Foundation, creative commons license)

In addition to Art Keller, portions of the story are told from the point of view of an admittedly not-very-courageous Ciudad Juarez newspaperman, Pablo, working with his feisty colleague Ana. They love and want to save their city, but it slips beyond journalism’s ability to prod action, as fear and graft overwhelm every sector, and reporters are threatened, bribed, and coerced into not reporting. (Winslow lists the names of 53 journalists murdered or “disappeared” during the period covered by his book and says, “There are more.”) And some is told from the point of view of a young boy who drifts into increasingly brutal killings, though no person whose pieces he leaves behind is more dead than he is.

If this sounds depressing and difficult, it is. And as Americans have become bored with the failures and setbacks and hypocrisies of the war on drugs, ever more so. For the people living in Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras, this war never goes away and they live every day with the deadly consequences of our personal habits and public policies. How can we, in good conscience, look the other way?

Nevertheless, Winslow pulls together his many characters from the competing cartels, the silenced journalists, the ordinary citizens, and the military leaders to create a compelling story. La Familia Michoacana, The Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas, the Sinaloans, the Juarez cartel, the South Pacific cartel. The gangs are all here, as is the Zetas’ IRL expansion into kidnapping and its efforts to horn in on the oil and natural gas supply. Yes, this is fiction, but of a “ripped from the headlines” variety with a powerful cumulative effect.

Mexico, drug cartels

“Your Fight is My Fight” (photo: Eneas De Troya)

Keller is endlessly frustrated at how everything the United States has done to combat drugs in Mexico—including such failed ideas as “Operation Fast and Furious”—has made the situation more unstable, more violent. (You will recall that in that sorry episode, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives allowed straw purchases of guns they knew were headed to Mexico, in the hope that tracking them would lead to the higher echelons of the cartels. Instead the ATF lost track of some 2,000 guns, subsequently found at crime scenes in which hundreds of Mexican civilians have been injured or killed.)

If thriller writers typically try to ramp up the sadistic violence perpetrated by their villains, in order to persuade readers how evil they are, in The Cartel, Winslow didn’t need to go beyond what he could find in the daily newspaper. In a Crime Fiction Lover interview, he cited the “astonishing escalation” of drug-related atrocities between the time he wrote The Power of the Dog and more recent years. It’s of a piece with the chilling non-fiction reportage of the late Charles Bowden, in his amazing Down by the River.

This is a long book and a long audiobook—23 and a half hours–and has a huge cast of characters. Still, the excellent narration captured the American, Mexican, and Guatemalan voices so well that I had no trouble following the story. It’s hard to say that I “enjoyed” this book, because it was heartbreaking on so many levels; however, Winslow has done a great service by exposing the deep and bloody wound below the U.S. border in a way that is compelling and unforgettable, and I’m glad I read it.

Booklovers’ Sand Sculptures

Posted on by
Alice in Wonderland, Cheshire Cat, sand sculpture

Alice (photo: Andy Field, creative commons license)

As the last weekend of summer approaches, a fitting tribute to two combined passions—going to the beach and reading—has been assembled by Kelly Jensen in this photo-essay for BookRiot, showing how sand sculptors around the world have interpreted the scenes of literature—from Gulliver to Alice—in that doomed-to-destruction medium, sand.

One wonders what the writers who created the books that inspired these creations might think of them. As they labored over a page, did they worry that their words would be as ephemeral as these amazing creations? Or that the tide of public opinion would soon wash them away?

Enjoy summer’s last fling!

****The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

Posted on by
graduate

Rob Peace, Yale Graduation

By Jeff Hobbs, read by George Newbern
– This biography, which signals its key irony by the subtitle A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League, is an honest and heartfelt tribute to a dear friend. Rob’s many gifts—a brilliant mind, athletic talent, easy social skills, and powerful loyalty to his parents, family, and friends—cry out for a different life path, while the forecast conclusion hangs over the book like a shroud. Nearing the end, the reader wants to go more and more slowly to delay it. Forecast, but foreordained? Hobbs wrestles with this question throughout.

Rob graduated from Yale with a degree in the intellectually rigorous fields of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and Jeff Hobbs was his roommate there for four years. But in addition to studying and working in a cancer research lab, Rob dealt marijuana. He did it mainly, it seems, to relieve his single mother—a nursing home food service employee—of some of her financial burdens. After graduation, he taught for a while, then lapsed into work as a baggage handler at Newark Airport because that job allowed him to fly free all over the world. He fell in love with Rio, visited Seoul, and kept up with a water polo teammate in Croatia. Now in his mid-20s, he continued to deal marijuana, even though the gang-infused streets of East Orange and Newark had become many times more dangerous than in the past.

Although Hobbs recorded the thoughts of so many friends and acquaintances Peace had during his post-college years, he cannot definitively answer the urgent question that so many of them asked Rob repeatedly and urgently, “What are you doing?” A question that is as much unanswered as, perhaps, unanswerable. They saw the growing danger and weren’t satisfied with his typical answer: “It’s all good.”

But it was not. When Rob was a boy his father went to prison for a pair of murders he most likely didn’t commit, and Rob took on the job of looking after his hard-working mother. She sacrificed mightily to keep him into private school, to see her dreams flower with his Yale education then burst when he just somehow couldn’t grab onto a life that would keep him moving forward.

Rob was the son of two entirely separate worlds—a New Jersey ghetto and a privileged Ivy League university. “That one man can contain such contradictions makes for an astonishing, tragic story,” said New York Times reviewer Anand Giridharadas, “but it becomes something more: an interrogation of our national creed of self-invention.” Try as we might, “there are origins in this country of ours that cannot be escaped,” he says, believing the most significant of which may be lack of an intact family.

Hobbs’s prose is unadorned. He’s writing about a friend, after all, and actor Newbern’s narration fits the text well. The clichés Giridharadas objected to in his review are probably not as glaring in the audio version as they would be on the page and, while the writing isn’t lyrical, it gets the job done, building an indelible portrait of so much good forever lost.

5 Forensic Science Myths

Posted on by
forensic

Mystery: why is this trainer so clean? (photo: West Midlands Police, creative commons license)

CSI’s wise-cracking investigators, expensive cars, and sexy co-workers with great hair? High on the drama scale, low on reality. Crime and mystery writers striving for drama and accuracy have to get past such exaggerated expectations. Deborah Cole, a forensic scientist with the New Jersey State Police, spoke to a recent meeting of the Liberty States Fiction Writers Group about forensic science myths.

The first is how television has primed people to believe that forensic science is infallible. The reality is that it cannot always provide definitive answers. Nor is it true that scientists never make mistakes or mess up the chain of custody. Sometimes “a good defense attorney can find holes,” she said. (Interestingly, criminals have become aware of the power of forensics and have learned from tv how to cover their tracks more effectively.)

Response is not as fast as people expect. Some states have only one crime laboratory, and crime labs are often small and outfitted with, well, not-the-latest equipment. As a result, they may have a backlog of testing to do, which adds to the time needed to complete tests (or whether they are ever completed at all, with unexamined rape test kits a prime example). Some tests themselves take a long time to produce results. Tests for different toxic substances must be conducted individually, and all this may take a month or more to complete.

Forensic scientists do not interrogate suspects and witnesses, regardless of what tv suggests. Not their skill set. And they certainly don’t make arrests. They may be called to a high-profile crime scene, but they aren’t there first (unlike in the UK’s Midsomer Murders tv series where the ME and crime scene team is always working away—with findings!—by the time the investigating detectives arrive). When they do visit a scene, they collect evidence to bring to the lab for analysis by someone else.

One scientist cannot handle an entire case. Forensic scientists are specialized (in the lab, their focus may be toxicology, chemical analysis, ballistics, and so on), which means that the evidence from a single case may be tested by a number of different scientists. The New Jersey State Police lab employs 130 scientists in different disciplines, and they are involved in some 35,000 cases a year.

Another reason one person can’t do it all relates to the Locard exchange principle: “whenever two objects come in contact with each other, there is always an exchange of material.” The practical application of this principle is that material from the clothing, floor, furniture, car, or other environs of the crime, which is gathered from the scene, from the victim, and from the suspected perpetrator (if there is one) must all be processed in different rooms and even by different people, in order to avoid cross-contamination.

Finally, Cole said (and she laughed when she said this), tv gives the impression that every day is exciting!

Further Information:

♦Useful for writers: http://www.forensicsciencesimplified.org/onducting Forensic ♦Research: A Tutorial for Mystery Writers: http://www.writing-world.com/mystery/forensics.shtml
♦Forensic workshops, including “TV v. Reality”: http://www.crimemuseum.org/forensic-workshops
♦Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us about Crime, by Val McDermid (2015)

 

Related articles

Body of Evidence: Cameras in Policing

Posted on by
angry man, police

(photo: Danny Hammontree, creative commons license)

State and local governments and police departments across the country are adopting body cameras for patrol officers. They can learn a lot about the benefits, risks, and unanticipated consequences of this policy from the several departments that have pioneered use of this technology, as Mike Maciag described in a recent Governing article.

In total, an estimated 22 to 33% of police departments are already using cameras. Rapid adoption without thinking through the necessary supporting policies, training needs, and long-term budgetary implications may cause this generally positive trend in policing to falter. The 7/31 release of body cam footage related to the death of Samuel Dubose in Hamilton County, Ohio, will increase calls for adoption.

Data Storage & Analysis

A hidden cost of the cameras is in the storage, retrieval, and analysis of data. “It’s the expense related to data storage—not the purchase of the cameras—that typically ends up being most costly for departments,” says Miciag, particularly for departments that keep footage for a year or more. (Video considered evidence in a court case might be kept much longer.) Writing up routine reports may take longer, if officers need to make sure their report jibes with the video. Departments must respond to requests for video from prosecutors, defense attorneys, the media (in some jurisdictions), and even citizens under state freedom of information laws or departmental policy.

Human Factors

Younger officers in tune with the YouTube era are more receptive to the cameras. “Typically, senior officers don’t see the value of the video or want the video unless it saves them,” said Kelvin Wright, police chief of Chesapeake, Va., which has used cameras since 2009. Traffic officers, accustomed to in-car cameras, also have been more welcoming. Policies need to be in place regarding when the camera should be turned on, as well as when it should not be turned off. In Daytona Beach, turning off the camera to avoid being recorded is grounds for firing. The cameras don’t record 24/7, because police need to be able to have private conversations and moments and to interview confidential informants.

Citizen Privacy

Not all jurisdictions/departments require that officers tell the public they are being recorded. A concern is whether people involved in a domestic dispute, for example, will not call police because they don’t want their grievances publicly available. Some departments require that cameras be switched off in medical facilities and other specific settings.

Benefits

On one hand, the Chesapeake department has found a sharp reduction in complaints against officers when citizens know their interaction is recorded, and many complaints can be quickly invalidated by the recordings. On the other, use-of-force incidents declined in a 2012 study of the Rialto, Calif., department. Analysts believe both police and citizens are more cooperative when cameras are present. And the footage is can be useful in other situations: letting community leaders see the imminent threat that led to a nonfatal police shooting in Daytona Beach defused a potentially confrontational situation. “Everybody behaves better when the cameras are on,” said Daytona police chief Michael Chitwood.

UPDATE 7/22/15

The disturbing footage of the traffic stop of Sandra Bland, which ended with her death in a Houston, Texas, cell a few days later highlights a number of challenges in using cameras in policing. Bland’s interaction with Texas state trooper Brian Encinia was captured not by a body-cam, but by a dashboard camera in his vehicle. The sound quality is excellent, despite the distance of the camera from the interaction.

Glitches in the footage–believed by some commenters to be “editing” of the video and by others as malfunctioning equipment–are sowing confusion in the case and beg for authoritative clarification. Trooper Encinia appears to lose his temper and escalate the situation quickly, when facing the initially uncooperative Bland. This is the opposite of how police officers are trained to behave.

Once he has her out of her car, the action moves to the side, and the camera no longer captures the video, though continues to record audio. A passerby recorded some of that interaction on his cell phone, however. Then, three days later, Sandra Bland dies in her cell, apparently between 7 and 9 a.m. Video of the hallway outside her cell reportedly shows no one in the area. Her death is called a suicide; friends and family don’t believe it.

People all over the country have seen this video now, as it was released to the media. However good the video is, alone or in combination with the cell phone footage, does it tell the full story of the arrest and trooper Encinia’s actions? What precipitated Bland’s death? Regardless of how incomplete information is so far, judgments will be made because people have “seen what went down,” and inevitably will interpret it according to their own experiences and opinions.

*****Elsewhere

Posted on by
mother & son, city street

(photo: Thomas Hawk, creative commons license)

By Richard Russo – This memorable book thoroughly and compassionately deconstructs the complex and intense relationship of a son and his troubled mother in “one of the most honest, moving American memoirs in years,” said Michael Schaub for NPR. Russo’s mother Jean suffered from “nerves” throughout her lifetime. She was a demanding, needy person, not unaware of her own flaws and shortcomings, and intermittently troubled by them. Russo, an only child, was her rock. She was also a pretty, lively woman, who went to extraordinary lengths to maintain the illusion she was living an independent life.

Only after Jean’s death did Russo learn enough about obsessive-compulsive disorder to fit the facts of her behavior to the characteristics of this syndrome, making a post hoc layman’s diagnosis. And only then did he come to the heartbreaking realization that his way of helping her might not have been the help she needed. She may have been a frustrating parent, but she just couldn’t help it.

The writing here is smooth as silk and contains great deal of humor. The well-rounded picture of the complex and loving mother-son relationship that Russo creates makes the reader more keenly feel the guilt Russo has suffered, despite his heroic efforts to respond to her plea, It’s you I need. (Meanwhile, in my opinion, Russo’s wife Barbara is a candidate for sainthood.)

He also gives a vivid picture of his home town of Gloversville, New York—a back-on-its-heels former leather-manufacturing town, whose tanneries poisoned workers and the watershed alike (he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, another post-industrial sad-sack of a town). Russo’s mother Jean couldn’t wait to get out of there, except when she couldn’t wait to get back. This cycle had a depressing regularity that continued for decades.

These are people well worth knowing and a relationship that’s understood far better than I understand what in the world went on with my own parents. Tiny bit jealous of Russo’s ability—the intellectual and emotional honesty and the depth of insight—to pull this one off so well.

Laurel Highlands Travel — Back to 1754

Posted on by
George Washington, Fort Necessity, Laurel Highlands

Recreated Fort Necessity (photo: wikimedia)

George Washington definitely slept here! Last year, the excellent (and highly readable) Joseph J. Ellis biography, His Excellency George Washington (my review here), interested me in Washington’s early career as a Virginia regimental officer during the French and Indian Wars—“crash courses in the art of soldiering,” says Ellis. At age 22, Washington was second in command of troops bushwhacking in through the dense forests of the Allegheny Mountains toward the spot where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to create the Ohio River. Today, Pittsburgh.

This was the Laurel Highlands, and Washington was leading Virginia troops whose aim was to recapture an old fort the French had seized at Three Rivers. One early morning in late May, Indian guides led the colonials through the forest to a stone outcrop from which they surprised a French patrol below. In the ensuing skirmish, in which Washington’s forces prevailed, the French Commander Monsieur De Jumonville was killed. Who shot first in the battle of Jumonville Glen has been long-debated, and Washington’s own explanations changed over time. Nevertheless, this tiny Laurel Highlands encounter ignited the Seven Years’ War, which eventually embroiled many European countries and their colonies scattered across the globe.

Since the French had a strong force in the area, the colonials built a modest circular fort in a small clearing, Fort Necessity. In early July a large French and Indian contingent attacked. Washington was forced to surrender, and in return for leaving the Ohio Valley for a year, he and his men were allowed to evacuate.

Meanwhile, the French built Fort Duquesne where the three rivers joined. But the British weren’t giving up. The following year they re-invaded the area, led by General Edward Braddock, who “knew all there was to know about drilling troops in garrison, something about waging war in the arenas of Europe, and nothing whatsoever about the kind of savage conditions and equally savage battlefields he would encounter in the American interior,” says Ellis.

Washington joined Braddock’s forces as an aide-de-camp, knowing the campaign’s planned route through more than a hundred miles of wilderness terrain was “almost impassable.” The steep hills and dense forests in many parts of the Laurel Highlands today give only a taste of how difficult traversing this country must have been. Unprepared as he was, Braddock’s forces were routed. From experiences like this, Washington developed a strategy of avoiding a fight his troops were sure to lose that stood him in good stead throughout the American Revolution.

Eventually the French abandoned Fort Duquesne, and the British replaced it with Fort Pitt. Fort Pitt was Britain’s most extensive fortification in North America, indicating the strategic importance of this position.

You can tour The National Park Service’s Fort Necessity museum (724-329-5512), and nearby sites, including a monument to Braddock, as well as follow the easy walking path (today!) through the woods to see Jumonville Glen. The outlines of the earlier forts, including Fort Duquesne, are recreated in granite on the grass of Pittsburgh’s Point State Park, which also includes a museum about Fort Pitt, within a replica of one of the fort’s five original bastions, as well as an original block house, the oldest architectural landmark in Western Pennsylvania, dating from 1764. Museum phone: 412-281-9284.