Eating My Way Down 17-A #3

The Italian Bistro II on 17-A is my favorite Italian eatery close to home. Nestled in a strip mall near the intersection of I-26 and US 17-A is place for lovers of Italian food to dismount. It seems that two guys came over from that boot shaped country and settled in New Jersey and later opened two restaurants in South Carolina. Fortunately for me in my eating my way down 17-A I found them.

Their place isn't overwhelmed with ambiance; a few Italian looking prints framed on the walls with a number of hand written signs advertising specialities. I think some vintage La Dolce Vita prints would have looked good.

There is an extensive menu like some other Italian places.  And, there's plenty of light by which to read the menu which is encapsulated in plastic unlike some of those fancy places with candles on the tables.  Part of the kitchen is open so you see the cooks at work preparing the food.  The attractive waitresses are prompt, polite, and ready to offer suggestions or answer any questions about the food.  As a native Southerner I was not familiar with the difference between a stromboli and  a calzone.  For me Italian food demands to be accompanied by either beer or wine. Lists for both beverages are not long but adequate.  Two Italian beers are offered. I favor Peroni. The desert list contains only three items, but after eating both the cheesecake and canoli any addition would be superflous.  Some friends tell me that the cheesecake and pizza are New York style.  I guess that is a good thing. I like 'em.

Prices are reasonable and represent good value. When we've eaten there we carried enough food home for a meal the next day.  Italian Bistro II does quite a bit of carry-out (that's take-away for you folks who invented the English language) business.

The next time my taste buds are requesting a dish that ends in a vowel.  I'm heading down 17-A to Italian Bistro II.

I Once Called It Home

I was fortunate not so long ago to visit a place I'd lived for a few years. It weighed 42,000 tons, was over 800 feet long, and had airplanes on its roof; the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Intrepid. I lived aboard for about three years.  When Mark asked if I wanted to go aboard again I jumped at the chance.  This famous ship is now the Intrepid Air and Space Museum in New York City.

The drive into the city was uneventful. We parked the car in a parking garage  a few blocks from the ship, which is at the 42nd Street pier.  We bought our tickets and went aboard.

I was really looking forward to seeing the old "Fighting I" again and to be able to show my grandson around it.  The first place we went was the flight deck where there are over twenty aircraft. Perhaps half of them weren't carrier planes, and indeed several weren't American planes.  But I did see one I recognized immediately.

"Hey, Nathan, look at this," I said as I walked toward a Chance-Voight F-8 Crusader with a shark's mouth on the nose. "It's Tony Nargi's plane!"

"Who?" Nathan said.

"Lt. Anthony Nargi. See it says so right under the cockpit.  Nargi's call sign was Stiletto, and he shot down a MiG over North Viet Nam while I was aboard the Intrepid."

"There sure are a lot of planes here."  "We carried about one hundred in 1968 and about one thousand men. I watched a lot of planes take-off and land here, and it's were I became a Shellback."

"A what?"

"A Shellback is  a sailor who has sailed across the equator. There's a big initiation with a lot of noise and activities. As a matter of fact I crawled half the length of this flight deck as part of my initiation. I'll put the video in this blog post and you can see what it was like. Right back there where that MiG 21  with the tiger on it is, we shaved the heads of two Phantom pilots."

"What was that all about?"

"It's another one of those Navy traditions.  When a plane other that one assigned to your ship lands on it you give the driver and the guy in the back seat a haircut.  We shaved their heads and painted stuff on their plane with spray paint!"

"It sounds like you had a lot of fun."

"I did, but I also had to work too.  I was an electronics technician, you know," I told him as we walked  toward the island structure.  "Let's go up on the bridge where the captain sat."

"No, our most common meat was roast beef which we called Intrepid steak! You could always tell when the bakers got weevils in the flour.  They would always bake a lot of raisin bread.  You couldn't tell the difference between a raisin and a weevil!  We did have some great meals though. I stood in line for over two hours for Thanksgiving Dinner once, and it was fabulous!"

We looked around the ship some more before leaving and going to the submarine and supersonic airliner.

On the way down the gangway Nathan asked me, "What did you think, Grandpa?"

"Well," I said, "I'm really glad we came, and I liked coming back, but it's not exactly like I remember it.  Everything is very clean, and it is easier to get around.  There's one other thing too."

"What's that?"

"It doesn't smell right!  I didn't smell any JP-5 jet fuel or diesel oil or hundreds of unwashed sailors!"

Totems and Tophats

We found a parking spot easily at the large modern building on the campus of the University of British Columbia.  This was the UBC Museum of Anthropology, and we were excited to see what it had to offer. I'm not much into "ology" things, but this seemed like a good idea.  The interior seemed quite dark as we entered the exhibition area after buying our tickets, which were around fifteen dollars each.  Maybe it was because we had entered from a bright sunny day. 

 "I'm really interested in the exhibits about the early inhabitants of  Canada.  I wonder if they call them Native Canadians?" I said to Claudette.

"According to the brochure they're referred to as First Nations people," answered Claudette.

As our eyes adjusted to the interior I noticed that many of the artifacts not on display were available for study when requested through proper channels.  After all, the museum is a research  and teaching museum where courses in anthropology, archaeology, conservation, and museum studies are given. All exhibits appear new or in pristine condition. We were drawn to  totem pole relics of weathered and decaying wood. They were about twelve feet tall with stylized images of animals.  

Some of my favorite objects on display were the woodcarvings. Almost any boy of my generation has whittled something of wood with his pocketknife. I got my first knife when I was five-years-old.  It was a gift.  Many of the carvings here are huge, such as  The Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid.  This carving depicts the First Nations creation story.  The raven found the first men in a clamshell, unlike the Native Americans of the American southwest whose story says man came from a deep opening in the earth.   

"Wow, this wood sculpture is really something," I said.

"There is no doubt they were men," observed Claudette.

"Yea, and I know I've seen this design somewhere before and recently.  But where?" I asked.

"I know," she said. 

"Okay, Miss smarty-pants. Where?"

"On the twenty dollar bills we used to buy tickets, she replied"

"See, you make it go through my hands so fast I don't notice what's on it!"

There is also a carving of a large Haida Bear, part of which is seen in my sketch below. Some of the carvings are modern interpretations of First nations art or reproductions of original works.  The wood is western red cedar. This wood is soft and straight grained and, like cypress, withstands the weather rather well. The First Nations people built their lodging as well as boats from the abundant wood.  Prior to the introduction of metal tools all carving was done with shell, bone, or stone tools.  The First Nations people probably obtained metal tools from the English.  The English explorer and sea captain James Cook visited this area on his last voyage in the eighteenth century. The Hawaiians later killed him, terminating his exploratory feats.     The oldest carved wooden totem pole in the museum is from the 1880's.  

"Let's go outside," I said as we  looked through the thirty-six foot high glass floor-to-ceiling windows at the rear of the museum.

"I see totem poles," said she.

"You know the first ones were short about head-high.  People had  'em  in their houses." 

"These are certainly taller than head-high," she observed.

Totem poles are an integral part of the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. They are always carved of western red cedar and tell the story of a family or clan.  The carvings can represent actual events as well as legends. They are a thing of folklore as well as history. I noticed that many of those in southern Alaska had a white man with a top hat on the top of the totem pole.  I asked a local shopkeeper why and he said that it was Secretary of State Seward who negotiated the purchase of Alaska in 1867. There are several totem poles outside the museum, along with a lodge building, as well. The lodge building was built of massive cedar timbers  and is decorated with carvings similar to the totems. I find much of the First Nations art not unlike that of the Maoris of New Zealand  and other natives of the Pacific islands. The trickster of First Nations folklore, the raven, adorns most totems and other decorative carving. Indeed the birds themselves are on the gravel path we follow.  

"I wonder what kind of food the First Nations people ate," mused Claudette. 

"They ate a lot of seafood, especially salmon. As a matter of fact when the Lewis and Clark reached the northwest Pacific coast the natives fed them so much fish that the white men got tired of eating it," I explained.

"So, what did they eat?"

"Believe it or not they preferred the natives' dogs!"

After exploring the outdoors a bit we went back inside and enjoyed the exhibits of native textiles, primitive tools, and other items of First Nations culture.  It was an afternoon well spent learning about an unfamiliar culture. We left, leaving thousands of artifacts unseen by us, but we needed to get to Seattle and a good cup of coffee.