All the Difference

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A Sunny, Yellow Dot on Google Earth’s New Site

October 5, 2011 in A Sense of Place, All the Difference, The Word Spreads | 2 comments

That’s where you’ll find us, on Google Earth’s new site, One World, Many Stories, in year 2005, 3 dots following the start of a program that has reached its one-billionith download (holy crow!). Click on this lively circle and you’ll read all about how we (Scott, really) used Google Earth to zoom in on a dream, to locate our vineyard, without ever having set foot on the ground.

In actuality, we discovered our land while Google Earth was still in its Beta version, in April 2005. But since the timeline really begins with the launch of Google Earth, we decided to use the October 2005 date as the day we finally set foot on the property itself.

We are honored to be that little dot, on that fantastic timeline, with all those others who set off and explored to make a difference, either in their own lives, or in others’. Thank you, thank you, Google Earth.

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All the Difference: Mark Twain

February 16, 2010 in All the Difference | No comments

All the Difference posts are about those people (and ideas) who dared to step off the busy highway and to follow one less worn for wear. Away from the crowds, these individuals walk to their own beat, with unexpected and singular results that may not always be for everyone, but that, my guess, was never the point.

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It was 1835. With little more than 50 years past the boot given to the British in our War of Independence, and only 20 years out of boot #2 from the War of 1812, a young America heard a newborn’s cry. Running with the unrestrained speed of a people newly cut loose, the fledgling country already was at a number of crossroads from all its people and ideas on the move. Abolitionists, Expansionists, Industrialists, Feminists, Capitalists, Unionists. Iron horses would soon replace the flesh and bones type, and water and its heated sibling, steam, would forever change the nation through cogs and gears, tracks and wheels. World blights and the eternal dream of a better life would provide cheap labor and transform a young nation from a backwoods land to a backwoods land with potential. It was a time when people’s optimism was as immense as the land they sought to tame. And their challenge and rejection of the legitimacy of another voice speaking for them left them ripe for their own. They would find it in this baby born in a small town on the fringe of the American frontier: Samuel Clemens.

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All the Difference | Carleton Watkins

January 14, 2010 in All the Difference | No comments

All the Difference posts are about those people (and ideas) who dared to step off the busy highway and to follow one less worn for wear. Away from the crowds, these individuals walk to their own beat, with unexpected and singular results that may not always be for everyone, but that, my guess, was never the point.

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Carleton Watkins. Just east of Oregon’s famed Multnomah Falls is a small gorge, named after my hometown, Oneonta, New York. Not looking like much from the Old Scenic Highway, it’s often overlooked; there are no monumental cascades visible from the road like some of the other parking-lot stops, just a dark, narrow, mossy chasm, where icy, rushing water squeezes between what looks like the stems of two basalt toad-stool protrusions growing from the rock walls, one on either side, their caps reaching out across the slippery current, as if about to touch. I always wondered why it was called Oneonta—there are a couple Oneonta’s across the US and I couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with my upstate New York birthplace. What did I know?

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