Buckeye Jim Weather

Cameo's Castle

"Cameo White " was just her movie name.
And although she grew into the name entirely, she never actually made a movie ...... but maybe that's not so tragic.

She was born "Camille Brown" to a mother (also named Camille) who seems to have become only the husk of herself afterward; there is very little mention of her anywhere. Meanwhile, Camille/Cameo became her father's pet, and mostly his master.
Her father, Elsworth Brown, was a Cornell Engineering graduate who became a Morse Chain design-chief. He bought several properties in Cornell Heights, and after the death of Oliver Fast, when the title to Bridge House came into question, Brown managed to get possession by paying taxes on it before the lingering matter of legal title could be completely settled. It was to be Camille's castle. Bridge House would turn out to be expensive for him, even though he never actually paid for it, but he had his motor-car industry investments to support the real estate.

Camille was still a student in the Art and Architecture school, but as soon as her father handed over the keys she moved right into Bridge House and began renovations.
First thing, she bumped out a studio dormer from the north-slope roof. Here she would, and did, paint highly exaggerated backdrops of local scenes, against which (with a still camera the size of a doll house) she photographed herself and occasional friends in improvised situations from unknown stories. Some of them them a little risky for the time. Most of these backdrops would eventually molder on the walls of Bridge house, or get painted over with graffiti, but several still exist in the university collection. They are kept rolled and sealed in refrigerated, climate-controlled tubes because of the certainty that unrolling them would also destrory them. The new imaging technology now being developed at Cornell and other places may eventually be able to scan and translate the image with the things still rolled up.

Simultaneously with moving into Bridge house, Camille began signing everything except checks as Cameo White. At that time, Ithaca was still experiencing its fifteen years as the motion picture capital of the world, as probably several other tinywood towns which never heard of each other. Cameo thought that Bridge House would make a perfect set for a movie, and that she ought to be in that movie.
The young Cameo often strode down the hill with her wolf hound to walk along the lake shore in Renwick Park, her long scarves flying in the wind as the tall hound on the long leash tugged her past the Wharton Brothers Motion Picture studios.
Among her first renters at Bridge House was a Wharton camera man: a Swiss citizen named Braun. In his spare time, Braun had invented a wind-up, clock-work camera, by combing an Ithaca Calendar Clock with some cast-off Wharton equipment. The clock-works kept the film moving without any of the variations in speed and swaying caused by hand-cranking. It had a big boxy cassette so that the film could be pre-loaded and back packed up into the gorges and glens were Wharton commonly filmed scenes of natural beauty and savage romance. The camera could be operated while it was still on his back, steadied by a third leg which he could drop from the carry case. Braun was still evolving the protoype when Wharton studios discovered California. Or maybe it was just New Jersey, but they left without Braun and his camera.
At some point Camille's mother had apparently become the shadow of her former husk and faded away entirely, without any account of it to be found... and then Camille's father died. He left behind shockingly little cash and deeply troubled assets as a result his over-investment in the Pope Motor Company and its "Waverly" Electric Car.

Camille got another wolf hound, and she changed her name legally to Cameo White. Cameo and Braun formed, registered, and promoted Bridge House Studios Incorporated. Bridge House itself and the Braun Clock Camera were most of their assets, and they planned to make an all-Epochal, local-centric movie, which would start back in fore-shadowy prehistory, with the a scene in which the early post-glacial pre-Iroquoin inhabitants of the Cayuga basin built a fire on the ice of Cayuga Lake, meaning to make the glacier retreat. Braun and /Cameo wrote detailed sample page shooting scripts, and circulated them widely, trying to raise money for the project. The next to last chapter of "EPICATHA" would be based on the true story of Oliver Fast's last days, but would include a seduction, a robbery, a murder, and a lot of resident wolf hounds.
By the time she had three or four wolfhounds, Cameo tended to speak with a slight Russian accent.
Periodically she would make casting calls, produce posters, and have the Ithaca newspapers announce shoots which did in fact get staged, with the camera ticking, and clacking, and small investors playiing small parts.
Braun and White's Bridge House Studios, did raise enough money to more or less support the real estate, as well as themselves, and the pretty expensive fund raising activities, for ten years and more. But they didn't raise enough money that it made any sense to actually use up precious film in their staged publicity shoots.
The fradulent enterprise came to a sudden end with a scene "filmed" on the ice of little Bebee lake , which was supposed to represent Cayuga Lake during the battle on the ice in which the pre Iroquoin Algonquins defeated the small, proud, resident people who believed they had stopped the the advance of the global glacier. The weight of the many student extras broke the ice, and dozens of people went through. Three were hauled out dead. One person was never found: Braun had gone down with his camera on his back.
They didn't have scuba divers for winter searches back then. The body must have bloated up and gone over the damn with the ice-out flooding.

But the camera was retrieved with grappling hooks in the Spring. It was intact and the film feed case was latched, but was discovered to be empty. Of course the film project was already sunk, but now there was scandal, mockery, humiliation, withdrawal.
Cameo White lived on at Bridge house, with no regular tennants other then a carnival woman named Missy Hoolihan, who was away traveling much of the time. Cameo continued to produce back drop after back drop of sceenes from more unknown stories, which no one would ever even dream of. Occasionally Miss Hoolihan would take one with her.
When Cameo needed a figure model, or if Missy had been away for a while and so she got lonseome for human company, Cameo would pull on her tall boots, and flying scarves, to take a hound or three and stalk down into the flats, looking for an interesting unfortunate whom she would engage in a discussion about their fascinating features, at some point handing them A dog leash or two, and then the dogs would pull them them up the hill . Some of these people had never walked up the hill before, and some would stay around for days. A few stayed until they eventually traveled on with Missy Hoolihan, as she came and went. Cameo seems to have brought home fewer strays humans, as her wolf hounds became a breeding pack of seven or eight.
In her later years, she was commonly seen coursing the Cornell Campus and Plantations with the dogs pulling , and she communicating with them like a troika driver, in what seemed to be out and out Russian, but a Russian professor who heard her said it it was pure doggerel. I'll let the dogs be the judge of that.

   And then one day, M. Hoolihan returned from a summer tour, to find the dogs very glad to see her, because ( as she told the investigator)  of course they were hungry......and with no water in their bowl and the toilet seats down, they might not even have survived, had they not been able to lick the condensation off the cold stone  of  the lower basements...... which, according to M. Hoolihan, they had always preferred to the water in their dish anyway.
   Anyway, something smelled very rotten in Bridge House........and up in the studio, she found Cameo, two or three weeks dead, her legs below the knees, entirely missing.
    M. Hoolihan offered to take over care of the dogs, but they were not released to her.
Considering that there was no injury to the the throat or upper body area, the medical examiners decided that the dogs had clearly only resorted to feeding on her feet, well after her death, Cause of death was given as heart failure, which is of course always at least a necessary condition of death. But the dogs had already been put down by some person person unkown.
Missy Hoolihan went to the police department and filed a formal complaint of murder against the executioner of the dogs. But that was the end of that.
M. Hoolihan left again, and it would be a long time before she came back.
If she were actually there now herself, she would probably have to be somewhere around a hundred and ten years old.

Weather Report: Go with the Flow, a Global Warming Oportunity

Gee's Calling

I'd known before William did, that when Gee went off to assist at the Pet Funeral and whatever.... she wouldn't be coming back.
I knew because she told me herself.....or to be precise: she told Olive. Gee and I had hardly ever talked directly.

The evening before she left, I was right here in this chair, keyboard in my lap, with my feet up on the footstool and Olive setting beside them and grooming her feathers.
It was already November and I thought I had shut the sliding door to the deck.
Then Gee stepped in.... as if through the glass. And barefooted too.


With a feathery hello, just for Olive - ignoring my feet and the rest of me - Gee swept down and huddled Olive up off the stool, then sat down in the Moris Chair with Olive cradled in her lap. Gee's Garlic Chicken scent sat in the air around me. Gee always smells like Garlic Chicken, not totally unpleasant, but a confusing perfume.
Gee was in her redskin phase, which comes from the sumac and herb baths. You hardly notice her freckles then, but it makes her pale blue eyes look like ice, even as they shoot fire out the sides.

She told Olive that we would definitely not be able to count on Gee being around here any longer for some people to ignore and complain about. She would soon be off to follow her calling,
Back to Bridge house, back to act again with old Missy and the tall animals.
Then she says, Missy would really really LOVE a crowing, singing hen......Olive could be a BIG star with the Review.....wouldn't she like to come along?

Maybe that was a purely rhetorical invitation , but I became temporarily literal-minded, and said something like "nofuggingway!!".... possibly in Capital letters.... but not agressively.
Just very negatively.

Still carefully cradling Olive, Gee stood , set her gently on the chair, then went out the way she'd come.
And I haven't seen her since........ though I occaasionally smell her.

Gee's probably doing a lot of the cooking at Bridge House now, and William is there eating it up.
I don't know how much he is really with the whole project, but Gee had gone through a radical conversion to it in her previous visit....when she had hitched all the way in to pick up some smoked salt for something..... and to just peek in at old Bridge house.




Bridge House is gated and padlocked at the gorge edge. A chain link fence extending fifty feet along the gorge, and it has been that way for many years, including when Gee and William used to resort to it occasionally, but it is easy to duck around one end of the fence and walk along the coon- trail passing just behind it.
According to William, Gee had come sneaking and peeking around the fence, and as she came close by the watch window, a face moved past the other side . The face appeared to her very like the face of Cameo White, in one of the old posters she had seen moldering on the walls of Bridge house . The apparition was so cartoonish that she knew it was only the broad work of her imagination imposed on a faded memory, and the merest glimpse of whomever it had been on the other side. She never did figure out exactly who it was, but inside she found that a few of her old fellow Tall Review travelers, were set up for wintering.
That night they threw a Hoolian especially for Gee..... and before it was over she was sure that she had found her ultimate role. Cameo White .



I suppose she had really had Cameo White firmly in mind well t before that encounter, and I am glad she has moved on with it, but I'm not so sure that Gee is distinguising herself from the role.....which seems important when when playing someone who came to a particularly bad end.

I am in no hurry to describe that bad end, and in fact I will avoid it as much as possible, but I can't much longer avoid covering the subject of Cameo White and her Enterprise ...maybe next time I post, but I have to go out to wrangle the chickens and do the weather.
By the way, as some people are already aware, Olive has not only demonstrated an ability to crow, AND to sing, but recently she actually said her first words : Thank You, when I had just given her three currants.
I expect there will be more words, but there is no way I am going to make a performing animal out of her. Anyway, she can't be commanded, and being taken from Dog's Plot would terrorize her.

Weather

William Don't live Here Any More

Brother William's hormonal heat for my high school girlfriend Carmella lasted even longer than my own, but he never got beyond his doggy attempts to hump her leg on the sly during the year Carmy and the Cheer Leaders adopted him as a mascot.

Gee was his first human lover and she was a slightly deeper involvement, but he had still been primitive enough with her, that......... after a few months of fireworks on the Roof of Goldwin Smith Hall, and nymphing though the gorges from Bridge House to Brooktondale......he had been able to walk off without notice or goodbye.

His cool stiff-arm, enabled him to make occasional use of women who imagined they could keep him as a pet, a curiosity, or a cause. But just about always, either he or the woman, one of them would actually fall in whatdoyoucallit with the other, and would either run out in flames or wake up in ashes.

Over the years, William became even more and more a loner.....if to be more a loner was possible for the original Feral Boy of Natural Bone --- who never would have even showed up in our back yard that day a million years ago, if the dog had not brought him home. Solitude really thrills and fills William. You can see it. He glows like a berry when he first appears in town from a month of drinking muddy water and sleeping in a hollow log somewhere.

After a couple of years with me here at Dog's Plot, William had begun to make noise about how he was going to drag his Ark up the to Great Slave Lake ..... and maybe he would have at least headed off that way... but then around came Gee again.
And he got to be uncharacteristically comfortable with Gee here.... but It still didn't seem like he was exactly on fire for her.

So when she left, you wouldn't expect him to go chasing after her.... especially when it means going back to Bridge house: the scene of several sad chapters, including one of his own which had ended unpleasantly.
You wouldn't expect him to go back to Bridge house, but you would be wrong.


One night a month or so back, I was trying to put together a little article on how to make your own private, floating island .
I had the old 35mm prints laid out on the floor and was photographing them with the digital camera, which does a better job than my old scanner.
But then William stepped in from the deck , holding the little red guitar Gee always used as a case for her chef tools.
He stood there {on several of my island prints) his face all twisted, the little guitar face down in his hands.......the door on it's back open . Empty.
Gee's velvet-wrapped French knife, steel, and stone were gone.
.
Did she leave the empty guitar to make him think for a while that she was going to return, or so that he would pack up and bring it to her? I don't know and William didn't say much, but enough said.
Two days later, carrying the duct tape guitar case mummy of what he had taken from Aunt Sammy years ago when he set off on his own, he stalked out the driveway, long pants twisting around his drywall stilts.

This means that now I can set up in the trailer to cut foam and do the first fiber coats on another floating island.

And then maybe Olive could brood some chicks there in the Spring.

Anyway, with William gone, the pretense that he and I are one and the same......is pretty much blown.

I have always had to do a lot of heavy editing on brother Willy's folk-typing ....and I obviously wrote the post about Bridge house entirely after he left.

I expect we'll hear from William before we even miss him...... and we wish him well, but regardless of William, I want to go on in another post sometime to tell about Cameo White: that most famous resident of Bridge House, who was Ithaca's greatest fraud and most frustrated impresario. She seems to be, from beyond the grave but without our needing to get all superstitious about it, still seeking acknowledgement and pushing her film project.
But first I have to crank out this Floating Island article, and here comes the weather to worry about.

Davey Weathercock's Green Revolution

As on this remote slope in tiny town, most of our midlife houses have standard asphalt shingles, cupped , humped, and cracked by sun and rain. Lichens and moss have found a moist home and scattered fairy ranges of tundra have evolved.
Field flowers followed in natural secession , and then woody plants like these black raspbery brambles.
Next on this roof came Honeysuckle. This one appears to be of the foreign invasive variety, but take it from Davey, if you uprooted it or one of the sapling cottonwoods (which actually may be adding some structural support to the entire system} THEN you and the chimney and all would likely fall into the everlasting darkness.
Here and now, in this rapidly aging world, we have to deal with things as they are, and immediately take care of the obvious chimney problem.


In place of the tree junk and rooted growth which has built up behind the chimney, there should be what roofers call a cricket: a short ridge between two little roof slopes, to shed water each side of the chimney. Nature loves a Cricket and has built one here, but it is not doing a great job of shedding water.

Davey's solution?
It's high time for a green roof conversion, and anyway, the process is well advanced.
So we made a U shaped aluminum trough and stuck into the cricket, to help it drain through. Then another to make sure the water was carried past the receding eaves.
We also gooped the minor flashing gaps at the chimney side, and made sure the squirrel entrance into the cricket was not going to take water and was unobstructed. You do not want to shut squirrels in your roof.
They might try to get out by way of the bath room vent .

And , in case I didn't say this at the very beginning. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WALK ON A ROOF IN THIS CONDITION. GET OFF OF THERE.

.