Jigsaw 20, Series 3, Report No.3

This snap from mid-morning on the ninth day. Progress has remained rather slow, and the last quadrant has only just been started. On the easy bits involving the scarf and hat which have both distinctive colour and texture and so are easy to pick out of the heap.

Still well short of the point where a piece picked at random, rejecting only pieces from stretches of background, can be placed more or less immediately.

Came away from this to a newsletter from the tree huggers at reference 2, complete with a map showing the location of their supporters. Some of which are surprising. Yet to work out the simple colour code.

But if you click on a heart you get part of an address. And if you then do something else - I know not what - you get taken in gmaps, where I was impressed by the nice tidy grid of minor roads to the north of Detroit.

Zoom in and it is not quite so tidy. But you still have the grid as a framework, which must make it a lot easier to find your way around than in the outskirts of our big cities. The advantage, I suppose, of starting with a clean sheet. Give or take a few First Americans.

[California redwoods on the Boy Scout Tree Trail in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. Credit: Richard Mosse for The New York Times]

The Ancient Trees people are quite keen on Wellingtonias and their relatives the coastal redwoods, in which connection they pointed me to reference 3. With the snap above being from the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, in the far north of California, almost on the Oregon state line. The colouring looks a bit unnatural so presumably the photographer - or the Photoshopper - went in for some trickery.

I am reminded of my failure to make Muir Woods, outside San Francisco, when I had the chance.

I take consolation from the fact that there are now far more Wellingtonia growing in this country than there are in California, half a million to ten thousand or so as I recall. Albeit quite young ones, with a lot of them dating to the second half of the nineteenth century, so between one and two hundred years old now. Juveniles really.

PS 1: the Richard Mosse of references 6 and 7 probably took the redwood snap above. The one immediately above is from the Amazon. That said, reference 6 is not your average commercial photographer site.

PS 2: I find now that Mosse is not new to these pages, having appeared something more than a year ago, in a very similar context, at reference 8. Confused by Windows search with mosses, which is not unreasonable. Reference 9 was nearby, reminding me of the Aladdin heaters of our early married life. While now, not for the first time, I wonder what the outcome might have been had we let the Russians, then the Soviets, get on with trying to civilise Afghanistan, rather than arming the rebels. I don't suppose they would have made it through to the Makran Coast, but who knows? They might have become very influential in those parts.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/02/jigsaw-20-series-3-report-no2.html.

Reference 2: https://www.ancienttreearchive.org/.

Reference 3: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/magazine/redwoods-assisted-migration.html%20target=.

Reference 4: https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=413.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedediah_Smith. A chap from New York State who got a taste for the western wilderness. Killed while still a young man by Comanches rather than grizzly bears.

Reference 6: https://www.richardmosse.com/.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mosse. A more or less expatriate Irishman. 

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/red-migrants.html.

Reference 9: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/alladin.html.

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