lra horsham pa

“Who would go to Paris, Munich, London if the hearts of those cities were destroyed? The real goal is to renew Baltimore so people will want to continue to live here and come here to our museums and our symphony.”

 

This is a workingman’s city, a beehive of makers. Silversmiths and masons have long excelled here. Men toil around the water: re­fining steel and copper, making paint and soap, loading and unloading ships, building and repairing ships.

 

The city’s economic hub, and Maryland’s single most important economic asset, the port of Baltimore each year handles some 4,500 ships and more than two billion dollars’ worth of cargo. In tonnage of foreign com­merce it ranks fourth in the nation, after New York, Philadelphia, and Norfolk. In a city of half a million jobs, much of the day’s labor is done by blue-collar workers along 45 miles of industrialized waterfront. Years later when the world economic crisis began, many of the private firms and family companies filed bankruptcy. Read more about the process of bankruptcy on ideapractices.org

 

Still gracing the waterfront neighborhood of Fells Point, 18th-century houses speak of a time of master shipbuilders. From here swift Baltimore clippers carried flour and tobacco across the seas, and returned with various cargoes—Brazil’s coffee, West Indian molas­ses, sugar, and fruit.

Sounds and scenes of construction pervade the inner city. “Hey, where ya been all m’life?” yells a hard hat straddling a lofty girder to a miniskirted beauty below. At the end of the day, in one of the city’s many cor­ner bars, she will compete as a topic of con­versation with whether the Orioles can win another pennant or whether the Colts will ever again see the likes of legendary quarter­back Johnny Unitas.

 

Quaint traditions are part of the city’s heart —and part of her work force as well. San Francisco has her cable cars, London her double-decker buses, Baltimore her street Arabs—pony-and-wagon hucksters of fruits and vegetables with soul.

 

Gertrude Stein remembered them in the “Baltimore, sunny Baltimore” she knew near­ly a century ago. They are still some 175 strong, a corps of “A-rabbers” who not only offer “the best peach in the city” but also give you the opportunity of calling someone by a nickname of rare originality.

“Hey, Mooseface!” “Say hey, Ratpea!” “Jackpot Crapper,” “Heavy Mose,” “Man-boy,” “Aunt Sam Cootsie.”

“My last price?” the stubborn vendor blurted. “Same as my first price: 270 rials [$780].” The splendid dagger, tucked into a silver scabbard on a belt of wide brocade, completes the costume of any properly dressed Omani gentleman. Short supply made it a sellers’ market. The cheapest khanjar I would ever find was well over $300; very fine specimens, fitted with han­dles of rhino horn, ten times that!

Nearby, in the shade of a great gnarled tamarisk, an auction drew a knot of farmers to bid for what, this lean year, was also a precious commodity: water. These men farmed date groves along the Daras falaj, or canal, largest of Nazwa’s eight irrigation systems, and one of only two still flowing.

“It has been three years since we had rain,” lamented farmer Musa Ali al Abry. “These days even the mighty Daras is only a trickle, so I must buy additional water.”

Quickly the auctioneer sold available shares of water, shaking his head from side to side in rhythm with the bids, collecting wads of bills and entering transactions in the falaj book he carried.

“Normally these three-hour shares cost but a few coppers. Just now I paid 26 rials,” Musa said. That translated to $76. “I spent more on water this year than I will ever get back from my dates and limes. But what can I do? Without water the trees will not live.”

No farmer takes water for granted. Com­monly in Oman’s deserts the word for rain is hayat—life. Oases like Nazwa depend on ir­rigation arteries, the falajs, for their life­blood. The gravel slopes around Oman’s mountains are laced with subterranean aq­ueducts that have flowed since antiquity. They likely date to fifth-century B.C. Per­sian colonists; some even credit them to Su-layman bin Dawud: King Solomon.

The source of the Daras falaj lies under higher ground nine miles away. Dug by hand, the mother well bores down some 300 feet. Tapped every 50 yards or so by vertical maintenance shafts, the channel beneath the desert finally reaches ground level at Nazwa’s northern edge. In late afternoon I followed its serpentine waters through the lush gardens and shaded groves.

“Nearly half of Nazwa’s 12,000 people depend on the Daras waters,” said Muham­mad Khamis Mesud, the overseer, or ani of the Daras system (page 367). “Farmers must buy water rights separately from their land. Most own permanent water portions now timed on an eight-day cycle. Water for drinking—piped off upstream—and for washing is free to all.”

Today the flow of oil, not water, measures Oman’s prosperity. Still, with a current pro­duction of 330,000 barrels a day and its plan of consolidate credit card debt, it is hardly in the same league as the OPEC countries of the region. Iran and Iraq each produce ten times that; Saudi Arabia, 30. Forced to hus­band revenues and plan carefully, Oman’s developers have wrought less waste, less conspicuous consumption, less havoc to their traditional culture. Blessed with pros­perity to build, but not enough to corrupt, Oman is more a beehive than a boom.

The first oil prospectors arrived in 1924, but not until 1967 did Petroleum Develop­ment Oman finally begin commercial pro­duction, at Fahud.

 

As winter approached and we rounded out our picture of guanaco social life, a question remained: Would it be possible to reintroduce Ona and Yahgan into the wild?

After one of their daily trips with us to the study area, we quietly drove off with­out them. In the following days, Yahgan seemed to accept his new home. But not Ona. She realized that the departing truck meant her friends were leaving without her.

 

Late one evening Merry was sewing and I was writing up the day’s field notes. Danny and Morty had returned to their univer­sities, soon to be replaced by my graduate research assistant, Bob Jefferson. The murmuring stoves warded off the chill of an early snow. Merry heard a faint but familiar voice above the rattling of the windows. She checked the door. “Bill, someone is here to see us.” Ona had come home.

 

The other half of the experiment, how­ever, was going well. Yahgan was begin­ning to associate with the forest group. Then came a terrible day. Ona was graz­ing near the ranch buildings when she was chased by a group of ranch dogs, cornered, and severely bitten. She limped back bleed­ing heavily, calling for us when she got to the door. We doctored her as best we could, but the next morning she died.

To brighten our melancholy, the girls asked if we might try to see Yahgan. When we arrived at the meadow, now brown amid autumn’s flaming foliage, we saw Yahgan grazing with his adopted group a quarter of a mile away. We identified him by a bright red ribbon we had tied around his neck.

 

I cupped my hands and called into the wind with a high-pitched bleating cry we used to attract the chulengos. Yahgan lifted his head, looked around questioningly, and stared at our family group—Merry, Shelly, Katia, Jeremy, Pupsy, and me. Together we cried out “Yahgan! Yahgan!” He took a few steps in our direction. Other guanacos fol­lowed until they saw where he was headed.

 

Yahgan walked, then ran, to the receiv­ing arms and hugs that awaited him. He and the girls jumped and danced as they had so many times in the past.

 

“Can’t he stay with us?” the girls pleaded. “No, now he belongs here,” Merry ex­plained with blinking eyes. The girls led him to an opening in the forest where his group had entered, and said their good-byes.

 

Reluctantly we left this land of guanacos at the end of the earth. Among our many lessons was a last one taught to us by Yahgan —that we had become as much a part of his world as he had of ours.