The University of Virginia is one of the nation’s top institutions of higher learning. Establishing credibility was a process, however, not a given—even with Thomas Jefferson as its founder. UVa went through very real growing pains, as Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos make clear in their new book Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University that Changed America. In the following piece, coathor Carlos Santos takes on an issue at the center of higher learning—tuition—and illustrates how Edgar Allan Poe’s folks didn’t have it any better than your folks…

Much has changed at the University of Virginia in the past 185 years, but not tuition shock—that feeling of parental despair and pain over the cost of a college education.  UVa President Teresa A. Sullivan recently released some sticker-shock news. She announced changes to the nationally recognized AccessUVa financial-aid program, reverting back to loans versus outright grants. The adjustments will be phased in over a four-year period by class, beginning with the 2014-15 academic year. Sullivan says that “once fully implemented, this new approach will help the University moderate escalating program costs by about $6 million per year.”  But it won’t moderate parental costs at all, of course.

Two centuries ago, tuition shock also struck Edgar Allan Poe’s foster father. Poe arrived at UVa in 1826. He traveled 60 miles from Richmond by horseback over rough roads and ragged paths to Charlottesville, a village of about 9,000 white people and 11,500 black slaves. The town was a bustling epicenter of an otherwise sleepy frontier. The scream of sawmills split the air filled with the pungent smell of smoke, distilleries and tanneries. Just outside the town was the state’s new university erected in “a poor old turned out field.”

Poe had traveled to the backwater town to get an education at the behest of his foster father, John Allan, who saw educating his foster son as a boost up the social ladder for himself. But Allan was tight with his money and he was stunned by the cost of tuition: $50 for the first class, $60 for two, $75 for three. Most students took three classes. Allan allowed Poe, despite his foster’s son’s pleading, to take only two.

I think it’s safe to say that Allan, a self-made man, suffered tuition shock at the idea of paying $50—the equivalent of $1,000 today—for a single class.

The current tuition rate tallies in at about $1,000 per class too by the way. But at least a student in Jefferson’s time could get a bargain by taking two or three classes. Paying $75 for three classes would amount to only about $1,500 now or $500 per class—a steal by modern standards.

Tuition follows that famous if anonymous quote about the law of inflation: whatever goes up will go up some more. Sullivan, following that law, explains: “Since AccessUVa’s launch in 2004-05, institutional costs have increased from $11.5 million to more than $40 million. Most of this money comes from tuition. Today, a third of our students qualify for aid, compared with a fourth when the program started. We have known for some time that these rising costs were not sustainable, and the Board asked the administration in 2011 to evaluate the program.”

If tuition pain has not changed, everything else at the school has, and for the better.UVa’s first day of school was held in March of 1825. The 125 students who journeyed to Charlottesville by horse or carriage were all male, all white, came mostly from Virginia and for the most part were the rich and privileged sons of plantation owners.The only African Americans at the school were slaves, euphemistically known as servants, who cleaned students’ boots and bedding and served their meals. Women in the precincts were either the wives of professors or were prostitutes sneaking into Lawn rooms to entertain students.

The Lawn itself was rough, a terraced court of muddy red clay where pigs and dogs and slave children roamed unfettered. The smell of chimney smoke and latrines wafted through the air. Open fields and woods surrounded the university. Many of the students, who carried hair-trigger tempers to protect their upper class sense of honor, were prone to violence – to fighting, biting, stabbing, and dueling either with fellow students or townies. The student violence bolstered critics of Jefferson’s university who considered the university godless and a playground for the rich. Mr. Jefferson’s university – and all the revolutionary changes it brought to American higher education—was almost shuttered by the General Assembly in its early, wild years.

UVa is now one of the top “public Ivies” and the state’s flagship university. Over half of the almost 16,000 undergraduates who descended on Charlottesville on this fall to begin school are women, while about one-third hail from outside Virginia. African Americans make up 9.4 percent of the student body, Asians 11 percent, while Hispanic/Latino students account for 4.5 percent. Many of the students are attending the school based on their academic merit. Most were in the top 10 percent of their high school class. U.Va, with a total enrollment of 21,000—including graduate, law and medical students—will become a boisterous roil of diverse youth on that first day of school.

What would Jefferson—a futurist, a despiser of tradition for its own sake, but a man stuck in his own time and a slave owner—think walking the Lawn today?

Carlos Santos is the co-author, with Rex Bowman, of the just published Rot, Riot and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University that Changed America.

Hassan Rouhani’s surprise landslide victory in Iran’s elections astounded Iranians, Americans, and much of the world. In his victory speech, he claimed he would travel the road to “moderation.” What does this mean? Is he a “mianeh ro” or “e’tedal,” meaning middle of the road or just man, or alternatively, is he simply against extremism? If so, is he a “centrist” and “pragmatist,” responding flexibly to different situations, or is he, as he has been called, “the diplomatic sheikh”?

To put it differently, is he a follower of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who, during his presidency in 1989-1997, sought little conflict with the West and catered to the governments in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia? Or is Rouhani remembering Rafsanjani for making room for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to ascend to the role of the Supreme Leader of Iran? At the time, I called Rafsanjani and Khamenei the riders of a “docharkheh-e donafari,” that is, riding a bicycle made for two.

Alternatively, is Rouhani trying to follow Mohammad Khatami, who created room for détente with the world in 1997-2005, made the world a safer place for the people of Iran by giving them a modicum of individual liberty and freedom of speech, and committed himself to a “dialogue among civilizations” throughout the world?

There is little doubt that the people who supported Rafsanjani and Khatami cast their vote massively in favor of Rouhani. The confrontational policies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005-2013 damaged the people of Iran. He claimed at the outset that “America needs us,” not the other way around. Rouhani criticized Ahmadinejad for his “careless, uncalculated and unstudied remarks,” such as his threat to wipe Israel off the map and his denial of the Holocaust. He indirectly blamed the influence of extremists and radicals on the poor relationship between Iran and major powers of the world.

Finally, what has he said about “moderation”? In a series of speeches, he has tried to explain what he means by this term, mentioned in the New York Times only in one paragraph on June 30. This neglect in the Times and elsewhere in the Western press is unfortunate, since Rouhani has spelled out what he means: “Moderation in foreign policy means neither submission nor hostility, neither passiveness nor confrontation. Moderation is active and constructive interaction with the world.”

Since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Iranian presidents have pursued an overall aspirational paradigm that I call “spiritual pragmatism,” embodying two conflicting elements. President Rouhani has elaborated. He says, “Moderation covers a wide spectrum. It begins with belief and convictions and leads to norms, behavior and action. It begins with economic and political affairs and leads to social and cultural issues.”

Rouhani’s views exemplify spiritual pragmatism, which begins with belief and convictions, spirituality, and leads to norms, behavior, and action, pragmatism. But they also reflect a contradiction that has not yet been resolved in Iran’s foreign policy. At the time of the adoption of the Iranian Constitution, there was tension over whether the rights of the people would be given the greatest priority or the rights of the faqih, and this conflict persists in Rouhani’s statements.

By covering decades of Iranian foreign policy decisions, my new book investigates what I call Independence without Freedom: Iran’s Foreign Policy. I try to place Iran’s foreign policy in the context of what I call “diplomatic culture,” defined as those values, norms, mores, institutions, modes of thinking, and ways of acting that have developed over centuries, have survived change, and continue to shape Iran’s foreign policy making to date. Rouhani might aspire to combine spirituality and pragmatism, but like his predecessors, he will be entangled in the endemic, unresolved problem of choosing between the right of the people and the right of the faqih.

R.K. Ramazani is Edward R. Stettinius Professor Emeritus of Government and Foreign Affairs. His forthcoming book is Independence without Freedom: Iran’s Foreign Policy.

In 2012, Robert Sibley shared his experiences on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in his book The Way of the Stars. Sibley’s latest book, The Way of the 88 Temples, chronicles his journey on the Henro Michi, one of the oldest pilgrimage routes in Japan. Located on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four islands, the pilgrimage comprises 88 temples and covers nearly 900 miles. Publishers Weekly has said of the book, “Sibley’s acute psychological observations are interwoven not only with vivid details but historical and cultural contexts of the ancient Shikoku pilgrimage. Throughout his journey, Sibley asks himself—and the travelers he meets—why walking the path is important. While he finds no one answer, this accomplished narrative demonstrates that the impulse to seek inner change through a physical journey, if mysterious, is enduring.”

Following is an excerpt from The Way of the 88 Temples.

*          *          *

I started out thinking of my pilgrimage trek as little more than an adventure—a “secular journey to sacred places,” as a Japanese sociologist puts it. But walking twenty to thirty kilometers a day for two months has both physical and psychological consequences. By the end of my trek, I was no longer able to dismiss the spiritual dimensions of the Henro Michi, including the presence of Kōbō Daishi, as mere folk superstitions. There were too many serendipitous situations and synchronistic circumstances for me not to wonder if someone, or something, was watching over me. I set out on one kind of journey but ended up on a very different one. This, of course, was not unusual. Pilgrims are often subject to “psychosomatic sensations,” and these sensations “are often the most significant aspects of pilgrimage in the view of the participants themselves.”

I knew none of this as I sheltered from the rain beneath the shōrō, or bell tower, at Shōsanji temple. I was just grateful to have reached the twelfth of Shikoku’s eighty-eight temples. I’d visited the first eleven temples during my first two days of walking. It had seemed easy. But this day, my third, was a killer. I walked—staggered—for nearly nine hours, covering fourteen kilometers along a trail that climbs and de­scends three mountain ranges. By late afternoon, when I reached the final steep staircase that climbs to Shōsanji, I was trembling with ex­haustion. My leg muscles burned and my back ached from the load of my pack. I was seeing spots in front of my eyes. Worse, the worm of uncertainty had crawled into my mind: the prospect of two months on the road was suddenly daunting. Rational or not, ringing the tem­ple bell was a gesture of defiance against the demons of doubt as well as an expression of thanks to whatever deities might exist for having delivered me from my inadequacy. It was also an appeal, superstitious though it might have been, for the gods’ help in the weeks to come. Standing beneath the shōrō, looking across the temple courtyard to the distant mountains, with my thigh muscles twitching in relief, I thought I would need it.

The Way of the 88 Temples is available now.

The first time I learned of Lukasz Luczaj was in a message sent from a log cabin in the Polish Carpathians. At the time, I was writing The Golden-Bristled Boar: Last Ferocious Beast of the Forest, a book about the astonishing world of wild boars, highly intelligent and elusive animals that have played a significant role in human civilization. A friend had written, “I am sitting on the porch with a bunch of people drinking beer, dusk falling, and we’ve been talking about two fires on the far hill that we’ve seen burning almost every night.  Lukasz just told us that one of the village drunks—a woman who meets her lovers in the woods—is burning tires because someone pays her to sleep up there and keep the wild boars out of the potato field.”

Two years later, I find myself plunged into writing a book on wild edibles, inspired by some of my childhood experiences from growing up in the New England woods and summers spent at the shore. My passion for gathering wild edibles was renewed later in life in France, a country rich with forest and shoreline wild foods and a long culinary tradition of eating anything that hops, gambols, or slimes along. I learned that Lukasz Luczaj was not only a botanist and author of books and numerous scientific papers but also a reputed authority on edible plants and insects who hosts workshops on foraging for wild edibles and cooking them. To see this man in action, I drove 1200 miles in two days from Paris, via Prague and Tarnów, and found myself sitting on the very same cabin porch above the village of Rzepnik, if you can call it a village, with a Polish group that included wilderness survival buffs, food bloggers, a film producer, and assorted escape-to-naturists. They were all equipped with cameras and note pads, ancillary to the critical tools for wild food gathering: baskets, spades, and pocketknives.  Lukasz, a solid man with shoulder-length hair and a two-week beard, ladled coffee with ginger and gobs of honey from a well-worn white enamel pot into an assortment of mugs.

At the peak of autumn, the lower Carpathians were in the midst of what Americans call Indian summer, deepening yellows with spots of red flaring leaves on rolling wooded land mixed with limited agriculture, a few docile cows chained to roadside lots of warm grass. Polish traditional songs mixed with Rock and Roll drifted from the lively beginnings of a Polish wedding held at a pink municipal building that looks like a modest private home.

“Weddings are taken seriously here. They can last three days,” a young, brunette food blogger counseled me.  ”The young people set up a ‘passing gate,’ and the reception guests must bring a bottle of vodka. You know, it’s a kind of toll fee.  It’s special, no?” The “passing gate,” I’m told, evolved from an old tradition of raising a dowry if the bride happened to be an orphan.

When I first arrived at the workshop in Rzepnik at 8:30 a.m., the group had already been out collecting an impressive array of herbs, nuts, and mushrooms. Lukasz was busy preparing breakfast in what he called his rectangular woks. His stove was a wood fire laid between two logs that supported a large sheet of steel mesh over the flame. Everyone was tasked with chopping nettles, slicing mushrooms, and picking nearby herbs.  Knowing well the perils of mushrooms, I scanned for the killers but quickly understood that eating at the workshop would be an act of pure trust. Or should I say faith?

My driving all the way from Paris nearly to the Ukraine border to attend a workshop in Polish baffled Lukasz. After all, France has many of its own experts on wild edibles. Villages offer tourists wild food festivals, particularly for mushrooms, fruits of the sea, and even wild boar. One French wild food guru conducts workshops and runs four restaurants featuring wild edibles. From all counts, he appears to be getting rich on French weeds.  I knew what Lukasz was thinking: why come to me? You don’t speak a damn word of Polish.  I came because Lukasz was unique, with interests ranging from researching foods in rural China for how peasants survived the great famine to studying Thai methods of fishing for dragonflies with a spider web on a stick. Besides, even the French wild edibles guru made a pilgrimage here!

The Carpathians are a 1000-mile range of hills and mountains that crosses parts of Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, and finally Romania. The range is home to boars, bears, and wolves, and perhaps most famously Transylvanian vampires, all lovers, one could say, of wild edibles of varying sorts. To my good fortune and mild sense of shame at my own cultural limitations, everyone spoke English, along with at least three other languages. Some information would invariably filter through to me. And it was true, a young blogger, a naturalist, and a former Polish judge who got his start painting houses in Chicago took me under their collective wings, interpreting for me.

For two days, we followed Lukasz tearing at leaves like goats; yanking up networks of fern root; spading wild garlic, carrots, and parsnips; plucking prickly hips and tart red berries, and pinching off greens that are better known in these parts as “famine food.” Famine food was important in this very place as recently as the years when the Soviets controlled Poland and guerrilla fighters hid in the woods after the villagers were relocated. There are even monuments in the middle of the forest for Resistance fighters from World War II.

Above all, this was the season for mushrooms. Locals already satiated in their hunt by noon, poured vodka and smoking cigarettes stood beside enormous baskets full of cêpes. The film producer had taken a one-and-a-half-hour course in wild mushroom gathering and was exuberantly collecting almost everything she could find, Lukasz tossing many aside as fast as she could find them.

Lukasz offers different cooking workshops: some are for purists who only prepare foods with what is found in the wild and others include certain outside ingredients. Ours was of the latter sort. We cooked a chicken underground surrounded by cattail and fern roots and Jerusalem artichokes that hunters introduced to the area.  We sliced through the putrid, spiny shells of water chestnuts—for sweet white-blue inner hemispheres. One survival fanatic and I washed tubers while kneeling by a lovely brook and talking about the culinary peculiarities of African wild edibles. The wedding had moved to the onion-domed church that seemed marooned at the end of the road with a blasted, albeit still living 500-year-old oak beside it still producing fresh acorns.

We were summoned to dinner with many clay-covered roots and tubers yet to clean. At the camp, acorns were boiling in ash from the fire.  Rose hips simmered for soup. Mushrooms steeped for broth. Two of the dishes were truly exceptional.  The first was a Thai stew that was based on thistle leaves. It included soy sauce, shrimp paste, galangal, tamarind, kaffir leaves, and lemon grass as the main flavoring. The second was sarma rolls, an ancient Middle Europe and Middle Eastern dish, wrapped in coltsfoot leaves that we collected, rather than grape or sour cabbage leaves. Inside there was wild onion, rice, and mixed mushrooms. But who knows which ones?  In fact, Lukasz accepted some lovely lilac-colored mushrooms that the film producer had picked. He was 99% sure of what they were but nevertheless cell-phoned the president of the Polish Mycology Society while we stood together fireside, the stars emerging and the wedding by this time cranking to full blast down the road. The answer was Clitocybe nuda. The three young women in our group could not have been more delighted. They decided the Latin name sounded more like a delicious Italian obscenity and began chanting of Clitocybe nuda, Clitocybe nuda over our boiling brews.

Without exaggeration, the workshop altered the way I look at plants now. It’s not simply that the edible species are so abundant and have wonderful stories behind them, that they possess medicinal and nutritional powers, but we also saw through Lukasz’s discerning eyes the beauty of their structures, from their roots to their leaf patterns. The meals were delicious, with a wide range of bitter and sour to sweet, belying what skeptics might say about wild edibles tasting dull. We learned too how our tastes and culinary imaginations are restricted by our own cultures.

The University of Virginia Press announces this week the launch of Founders Online, a website offering free access to the papers of six of the most important figures from America’s founding era—George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. The site will make nearly 120,000 documents freely accessible to the public. Developed by the Press’s electronic imprint, Rotunda, Founders Online will be officially launched at a ceremony at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. on June 13. University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan will offer remarks on this unique collaboration between the Archives and the University.

Starting in 2011, Rotunda staff began developing the Founders Online platform under a cooperative agreement with the National Archives of the United States’ grant-making arm, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). The content is derived from two sources: our Rotunda American Founding Era collection, based on published letterpress editions, and transcriptions of thousands of documents being made available on a “pre-press” basis thanks to the Early Access program undertaken by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities’ Documents Compass program.

Founders Online will include thousands of documents, replicating the contents of 242 volumes of the published print editions. As each new print volume is completed, it will be added to the database. All of the “Early Access” materials—an additional 55,000 unpublished and in-process documents—will be posted online over the next three years. Students and researchers will be able to view transcribed, unpublished letters as they are being researched and annotated by the documentary project editors and staff. Together, some 175,000 documents are projected to be on the Founders Online site.

“UVa Press is honored to be working with the NHPRC on Founders Online,” said Mark H. Saunders, Interim Director of the University of Virginia Press. “This resource brings together the papers of six major founders in a user-friendly website that gives Americans and people around the world a first-hand account of the historic conversation that formed our democracy and allowed our country to thrive.”

“This resource will be of immense value for the public to understand both the world and intentions of the nation’s founders,” said Kathleen Williams, Executive Director of the NHPRC. “Founders Online provides a bold economic, educational, and technical model that will yield important lessons as we plan for future online publication of historical materials.”

Founders Online represents the cumulative work of hundreds of historians, editors, publishers, and (more recently) computer programmers over the decades since the first modern documentary editions began with the publication in 1950 of the first volume of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson by Princeton University Press.

We wish especially to acknowledge the current and former UVAP staff members and collaborators who have made Founders Online possible. Thanks to former Rotunda staffers John Carlson and Mary Ann Lugo, who oversaw much of the digitization and XML conversion, under the guidance of editorial and technical manager David Sewell; Rotunda senior programmers Shannon Shiflett and Tim Finney, who developed the original delivery platform used in our Rotunda Founding Era collection; Rotunda editorial and technical specialist Markus Flatscher, who oversaw the bulk of our digital conversion and handled the XSLT conversion of files received from the Jefferson Retirement Series into our own XML format; editorial assistant Virginia (Annie) Kinniburgh for proofreading and formatting; former UVA Press director Penny Kaiserlian and current interim director Mark Saunders, who handled the negotiations for our collaborative agreement with the NHPRC; and The Ivy Group of Charlottesville, for initial design requirements, user surveys, mockups, and prototypes—the look and feel of Founders Online owes much to their work. All of the XML data analysis and conversion and MarkLogic XQuery/XSLT programming for the new Founders Online platform have been done by David Sewell and Tim Finney.

We could not have completed our digital editions without assistance from the Founding Fathers projects: Jeff Looney, Susan Spengler, and Lisa Francavilla of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson—Retirement Series; Mary Jo Kline, who served as the editorial consultant for our work with the Papers of Alexander Hamilton; Ted Crackel (retired) and Jennifer Stertzer at the Papers of George Washington; Sara Sikes and her staff at the Adams Papers; Martha King at the Papers of Thomas Jefferson; John Stagg and David Mattern of the Madison Papers; and Alysia Cain of the Franklin Papers and her graduate assistant, Michael Hattem.

Finally, we recognize the invaluable assistance of our third-party vendors and the creators of software that we use: HCL America for their XML conversion; MarkLogic, which produces the native XML database platform that delivers Founders Online; and IBM Global Business Services, partnering with SOASTA, performed state-of-the-art load testing on the completed FO platform. Our work with large and complex XML datasets would be much more difficult without the excellent software provided by SyncRO Soft, the creators of oXygenXML and Michael Kay, creator of Saxon.

A video about the making of Founders Online may be viewed below or through this link.

She was only fourteen years old when she died at James Fort, part of the Jamestown settlement, during the winter of 1609-10. That winter has been called the “starving time” because of its particular brutality. The settlers dared not stray far from the fort, for fear of being preyed on by the Powhatans, and so they had been driven to eat rats and snakes in order to survive. Until now, the possibility that human flesh was also devoured had been just speculation. Recent excavation at the former site of Jamestown, however, confirms that during the “starving time” the fort’s inhabitants did indeed resort to cannibalism.

William Kelso, chief archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project and author of our Jamestown: The Buried Truth, led a team that discovered, in a pile of bones of slaughtered animals, the skull and leg bone of the young girl “Jane.” The marks found on Jane’s remains–marks made by manmade objects that show deliberate hacking and cutting–are consistent with findings on the bones of cannibalism victims. Using the skull, researchers were able to construct a replica of the girl’s head, seen in the photo top left.

This unnerving, but fascinating, episode in American colonial history is the subject of reports by the BBC and by U.S. News & World Report. The Jamestown Rediscovery Project has produced the video below, in which Dr. Kelso and other experts illustrate the significance of this remarkable discovery.

Christine Dumaine Leche, editor of Outside the Wire: American Soldiers’ Voices from Afghanistan, appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition to describe the creative writing class she taught in occupied Afghanistan and her amazing students, all of whom were American soldiers. You may listen to the interview here. In the following piece, “Flight to Salerno,” Leche takes us behind the scenes of this powerful new book. The trying journey described here is only the beginning of military life in Afghanistan.

I had been on FOB (forward operating base) Salerno a week. Until then, I had been teaching most of my classes—English, Creative Writing, and Speech—to Army, Marine, and Air Force soldiers, and even a few Navy seamen, on Bagram Airbase. But soldiers on remote FOBs need a diversion, and want a chance to earn some college hours while deployed, too, so I had volunteered and now sat slouched in a metal folding chair in the freezing, cement-floored Bagram PAX terminal all night with seventy or so ragged, exhausted, depressed soldiers waiting for connecting flights on a helicopter, Cessna, or C-130, we never knew which, to remote FOBs. We snacked on potato chips and pasty chocolate chip cookies from vending machines while late ‘90s movies threw flickers of light in our faces. The actors’ voices were hollowed into garble by the metal roof and cement floor of the terminal, but the mouths, eyes, and hands continued gesticulating, and a fair number of us, glazed by the need for sleep, watched on.

When my name was finally called, I dragged my green sausage of a duffle bag to the back of the line behind a couple of corporals built like defensive linemen. We were led a block or so onto the flight line, then to the doorway of a six-seater Cessna. Each of us was scared, cold, and alone, and weighed down by a 30-pound camouflaged flak vest and Kevlar helmet. I hoisted myself up onto the single step and bent forward through the low metal doorway. The three of us crammed into undersized seats made smaller by our awkward flak vests, and through windows the size of dinner plates we watched an F-15 fighter rip down the gray, parallel runway only a few feet from us. Then a C-130 lumbered along behind it like a slug. It hummed that low, deep-throated groan—uummmm—the misery music that permeates Bagram Airbase twenty-four hours a day. Another instant, and the F-15 broke the sound barrier with that symbol of American might, a deafening, vibrating thud. I wondered where the bombs were headed.

On our Cessna’s steep “combat” takeoff, I thought about the nineteen- or twenty-year-old Private on the metal chair in front of me back in the PAX Terminal. He had been bent forward, one elbow on a knee, curled as if staring at a meaningless speck on the cement floor. He rocked just a little in his chair. His hair was that kind of clumped dirty that comes from having slept outside in the open, from sweat and wind. He combed his fingers through it, forehead to crown, in quick strokes, back and forth. Somebody’s son. He was bent over himself, elbows to knees–as if there was a thought he could not take. Something was wrong, real wrong. He had lost a parent, or his wife back in the states had cheated on him or spent all their money, or he was going to the Korengal Valley to a FOB so remote he would have to burn his own excrement, sleep covered in fleas, dodge tarantulas, and might die. Could very well die.

From the sky, Afghanistan is at peace. As the Cessna climbed its steep slope, Bagram’s cement runway became a hyphen in the dust. Soon the world below was a beige-toned infinity punctuated by clusters of mud-brick walls. Villages like tic-tac-toe boards drawn out on the earth, each mud square with a mud house huddled in a corner. After ten minutes or so the view became more rugged. If the earth’s crust had once been a primordial sea, here its hurricane-force waves had frozen into dirt. The infantry soldier across from me was raised on an Iowa farm, just touched down in-country the day before and said he was scared as hell of all planes never mind one the size of a tuna can. He kept tapping the butt of his M-16 on the metal floor and sighing. He was maybe twenty and flinched each time we hit an air pocket. The back of the pilot was only a couple feet in front of us. Inches in front of him came the dials the size of wristwatch faces that held our lives in the balance of their trembling arrows. Twenty minutes later we were crossing the snow-covered Hindu Kush, a field of chiseled daggers as far as the eye can see. The Cessna flew low, meandered between gray spikes draped in snow. Soon we were humming our way over foothills. Then the pilot pointed the plane nose down toward the gravel runway and took us combat-fast into Salerno.

I knew I had my work cut out for me. I caught a ride to my sleeping quarters with a couple of soldiers in a Humvee, dumped the personal stuff, then reported to the education building, a three-room bunker. I set up a table in front of the AFES (military) store that sold pillows and souvenir beer mugs, CDs, and Doritos, so I could first capture people’s attention and, I hoped, register some students, since none had yet signed up for either of my courses. I unpacked the enticement to earn some college credit: free pens and key chains with the university’s white-on-navy logo. There were stacks of catalogues and registration forms. I had brought along an Army green foot locker of English 101 and Library Skills textbooks. By noon I had registered fourteen soldiers. Class would begin in a small room built as a bunker at 1800.

Outside the Wire: American Soliders’ Voices from Afghanistan is available now.

Regular readers of our blog were treated a few weeks back to the story of Fly, a seven-year-old sheepdog “owned” by Donald McCaig. McCaig, the author A Useful Dog and the soon-to-be-released Mrs. and Mrs. Dog: Our Trials, Travels, Adventures, and Epiphanies, continues the story of Fly in this new piece.

Noticing many sheepdog handlers wear shooting glasses to eliminate glare, a novice asked top handler Scott Glenn, what color glasses she should order. “Rose-colored,” Scott deadpanned.

I ask a lot of my dogs: I want an intimate working partnership. I want them to handle any breed of sheep on any terrain in blowing snow, scorching heat, or moonless night. I want them to be politely indifferent to other dogs and mannerly in airports, office buildings, packed elevators, other people’s homes, and public places. I can only ask this much if I can see my dogs; if I’ve put those rose-colored glasses aside. Seeing them is easier said than done.

I was making progress with Fly. She was getting around the trial course and she was more mannerly (not a high bar: she’d been a biting, hysterical, gyp who didn’t know where she lived or where she belonged, clinging desperately to a mistaken image of who she just might be). If she’d gone to a pet home she would have been put down.

Welshman Aled Owens won the World Trial I describe in Mr & Mrs Dog, and he would teach a sheepdog clinic in sunny Georgia. T’weren’t sunny. After hypothermia twice at dog trials, you’d think I’d have learned: PACK FOR THE WORST. It rained cold rain.

Aled trained in a 20-acre field. Novice dogs dragged parachute cord so they could be caught, but he and their handlers did lot of running until each young dog settled. At my age, I admire those who can run. At all.

At my turn, I told Aled, “She’s a seven-year-old open-trial dog who has soured. She’s come partway back but isn’t there yet. Tell me what you see.” At seven years old, trained sheepdogs are well settled into their method and by eight, you won’t be able to change it much. But Fly had had a method at one time. She’d won difficult trials. So I wasn’t so much teaching something new as I was summoning up and rephrasing old skills in a new context.

In our first month Fly wouldn’t work at all. When she started, tentatively, I sent her after the ewes every morning, wherever they were on 160 rumpled acres. No commands. I let Fly figure it out. Her pleasure in the work reawakened, I started adding commands. For nearly a year she’d take commands at home but when they came hot and heavy at a trial, she’d quit. She couldn’t take the pressure. Fly’s theory: I’ve done everything I can and it hasn’t been enough so why break my heart trying?

I had to build her up to take more pressure, while reducing pressure where practicable. Last fall, at the Virginia trials, I’d leave home in the morning, drive 3 hours, run Fly and drive three hours home so she’d be back in her own bed every night—just so that trialing would seem more like “doing a little farm work”. At trials, I gave as few commands as possible—if she was wildly off line for a panel, I didn’t use the deluge of hard commands she needed to hit it. If she was ready to quit, I retired while she was still trying. I set up panels at home and insisted she make them. If she quit at 200 yards, we tried again at 100. Six days a week.

I took her out into the big world of people, dogs, airports, unfamiliar scents, sights and sounds. I trusted her a little more
than I was comfortable with and she’s repaying me. The issue isn’t “can I control her?” but “Must I watch her every moment?”

When we returned to the farm after a week in Seattle, Fly jumped out of the car. I swear I could see her realization: “Oh, so this is my HOME! I will always come back HERE.” Can’t blame her for being slow to figure that out. This home is her sixth.

So I work her. Aled watches. “Do you see how she’s makes that little move, after she’s downed, to hold the pressure?” The sheep are heavy to the exhaust and Fly doesn’t want to go off balance (holding them to me). She trusts HER more than she trusts US. Aled says I’m putting too much energy in my DOWN, that I need to make it more neutral. That one’ll go in the brainbox for later consideration. Lifetime habit, different use of the down. But Aled Owens did win that World Trial and I sure as hell didn’t.

Getting the best out of what the sheepdog coach has to offer is hard because I (and perhaps you) ask our question with an answer already in mind.

I had expected magical advice about de-souring. “Hmmm, better train this gyp in the last quarter of the new moon”.

What I got was useful practical how-to’s. “Flank her around you, turning so you face her. . . . She’s reluctant to be pulled off balance on her comebye side. . . . She needs a better ‘down’. . . . She doesn’t like downing on the drive.” Practical observations from a Master. “Pick up the jacket. Drop the Jacket. Pick up the jacket…”

Advanced sheepdog clinics and dog trials are dog safe: the dogs are mannerly, handlers are dog-savvy. In thirty years I’ve never seen a dogfight at a sheepdog trial. When Fly came to me, she bit people, and if she was loose she’d flee back to the house or the familiar car. Today while I watched other instructions, Fly wandered around exploring until she got bored and came back to sit beside me.

Just like all the other ordinary sheepdogs. When we think about our dogs we picture their quirks, their endearing traits, and their exceptionalisms, both good and bad. No sheepdog can ever replace another; each is unique and uniquely beloved.

But in another sense, all good sheepdogs are the same. They get the work done. While not working, they are mannerly. Fly is becoming ordinary.

Mrs. and Mrs. Dog: Our Trials, Travels, Adventures, and Epiphanies will be published in late March and is available now for pre-order.

The Louvre’s collection includes still-life paintings by the Dutch masters that render sumptuous foods—oysters in particular—with spectacular realism. One of the advantages of living in Paris is that you can simply stroll over to the Louvre and consult these works with your own eyes, in this case in the Richelieu Wing where rooms are dedicated to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch painting. There is no time better to visit a European art museum than in the “r” month of January, and I wanted to see for myself exactly what was going on with the Dutch artists and their singular obsession with oysters.

I wrote to my Dutch friend Geron de Leeuw, a food writer and chef, asking what the oyster represented to his country’s Golden Age still-life painters. He said that people believed oysters possessed aphrodisiac powers, and symbolically represented fertility and prosperity. “Rendering oysters was a bit naughty,” he added, “since they stood for sexual freedom in a time when Calvinism swept the Netherlands.”

Of course, the suggestive form of oysters adds to their sexual insinuations. In Jan Steen’s Girl Eating Oysters, an attractive young woman looks coquettishly at the viewer with an alluring smile while offering an opened oyster.

Oysters possessed other symbolic meanings, representing taste, sensuality, and the temporary pleasures of earthly existence. They are often featured in still lifes known as vanitas, lush cornucopias of foods (some barely eaten), half-finished glasses of wine, lemons with rinds peeled in a spiral signifying the unraveling of time, all caught in hyper-real stillness and masterful rendering of light as it glints off silver, glass, and perfect pools of oyster liquor.

While these paintings are stunning, I studied them for another reason: the oysters don’t look anything like the ones my father, brother, and I collected and ate during the years I grew up in New England, nor do they look like the most common oysters in France, a country famed since Roman times as Europe’s greatest oyster producer. Clearly, the seventeenh-century oysters in the paintings were rounder and flatter than the typical creuses, oysters with a cupped shell that are consumed worldwide.

Through the ages, oysters have reliably served humans. Even Neanderthals ate the original flat European oysters, probably more as “last-chance foods” rather than to bolster sexual prowess. Oyster shells have been fashioned into tools, jewelry, and false teeth; ground up for mortar; and pulverized for biomineralization to relieve osteoporosis. The oysters themselves provide zinc, iron, selenium, and vitamin B12, making them nature’s depression-fighting food. They contain the whole alphabet of vitamins as well as iodine, calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, and copper—all contributing to general nutrition and bolstering the immune system. Their omega-3 fatty acids are good for the heart. Now, what the Dutch and just about everyone else claims about oysters being an aphrodisiac is supported by scientific studies on amino acids, specifically D-aspartic acid and N-methyl-D-aspartate. It’s hardly a wonder that Henry VII held oyster orgies, Napoleon consumed them before battles, Voltaire and Rousseau ate them for inspiration, and Casanova enjoyed passing one between his lips and those of his lovers. Oysters even figure prominently in the “Party Girl Diet.”

It must be obvious that I’ve always been passionate about oysters, and now I find myself living in a true oyster-crazed country. Oysters come in all sizes and from a variety of locales—most notably, going from Normandy to the Aquitaine, Isigny, Cancale, Belon, Bourneuf, Marennes-Oléron, and Arcachon, all boasting perfect conditions for the most delectable produce. The French devour tons of oysters over Christmas and New Year’s, when 70 percent of the annual harvest is eaten. Of course, a good number of oyster lovers spend the holidays with gastroenteritis, but they don’t seem to consider it true cause-and-effect—a bad oyster—but just a bit of holiday bad luck.

I wanted to know more about the genuine European oysters, the ones in the vanitas paintings urging us to indulge earthly sensual pleasures while we still have the chance. I visited most of the major oyster-growing areas in France, including the mucky tidal estuary of the Balon River on the southern side of Brittany’s Finistere, literally land’s end, where Paul Gauguin once painted land- and seascapes. Gauguin also produced still lifes with oysters, and again the oysters resemble the original flat European variety, which many connoisseurs consider the ultimate oyster. These are now raised in the States, where they are prized for their meaty texture and the savor of sea and minerals.

While researching huîtres plates (Ostrea edulis), also known as Belons, I discovered a shocking relative, the wildest of all wild oysters, called a pied de cheval, or literally “horse’s foot.” While they share an uncanny round appearance, the oysters grow wider than a horse’s hoof. Pied de cheval can weigh as much as three pounds and live for thirty years or more, with one equivalent to six good-sized oysters. This enormous rare oyster, found in Normandy’s Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, is a specialty of certain restaurants.  Most people, including the French, have never heard of them.

I watched an interview with a French chef who, rather than describing the overall sensation of eating the oysters, focused instead on three parts of the anatomy of the pied de cheval as if each were a wine. This oyster is perfectly equilibrated for flavor. The liver is soft, creamy, and sweet; the foot is muscular, musty, and chewy with fine, long-lasting taste; and the mantle, the tissue at the lip, is pleasantly bitter. The chef prepared the enormous oyster by cooking it very delicately until tepid and then adding a little cabbage and cream curry sauce.

These record-sized oysters, which have been found in the Chesapeake Bay and close to Humbolt, California, weighing in at more than eight pounds, seem almost large enough for Aphrodite, the love goddess and root of aphrodisiac, to have been conceived in. My favorite oysters are large but not huge, just a perfect mouthful. But the pied de cheval being a delicacy and an oddity intrigued me so much that I planned a trip the Bay of Saint-Michel just to see if I could find one.

I had no idea what I was doing. It’s not like you can dig these up or find them stuck to a rock, as they live in the middle of the English Channel. I hiked the shores above Grandville, a major port, and found shells from pied de cheval everywhere, along with an enormous array of wild edibles. Clam diggers were more than a mile out on the surreal stretches of sand, their dogs running free in long elliptical orbits. No one from the fishing fleet from Granville was selling pied de cheval, so I drove past Mont Saint-Michel to Cancale on the western shore of the bay. Cancale is one of France’s most famous producers of oysters, and sure enough on the north side of the port there were at least eight stands selling and opening oysters for whole families, who sat along the boat ramp and ate dozens for lunch. It was as if we were transported to the nineteenth century, when families strolled to the port and snacked on oysters. The shore was covered with lemons.

On the farthest corner on the left was an uncommonly large, ruggedly handsome vendor with black hair who displayed a crate of pied de cheval. I couldn’t believe my luck and asked, “How much are these?”

“Four euros.”

“Each?” Even if it equaled a half-dozen oysters, this rare oyster seemed expensive. “Okay, I’ll take one. How should I cook it?”

“Cook it? Oh no, you don’t cook these. That’s criminal. Here, I’ll open it for you,” he offered. “Don’t put even a drop of lemon on it. It must be eaten just as is. Nothing is better,” he assured me.

A big man like him might be able to eat a pound of oyster in a gulp, but I was taken aback. I stopped him from opening it. “I will take it with me. I want my wife to taste it too.” I walked with the oyster in hand, feeling like a Greek discus-thrower. In the afternoon, I picked up my wife, Mary, at St. Malo train station, and we headed for Brittany to enjoy the weekend by the sea. Once in the car, I introduced her to my oyster and she was suitably shocked. “He’s huge! And so beautiful. Where did you find him?”

Author M. F. K. Fisher points out in Consider the Oyster that oysters have a peculiar habit of switching sexes, so one can never be sure of the gender. I settle on “it” instead of “him.” “I didn’t find it. I bought it,” I confessed, knowing this would be a bit of a letdown.

Meanwhile, Mary was more than happy just to admire the oyster with me, but had no intention of putting any of it in her mouth. I debated whether I should put it back in the sea or eat it raw to understand the savors and textures of the different parts. It traveled with me for three days, refrigerator-hopping, until we arrived in Paris; there I knew the oyster’s fate was sealed. I set it on the counter, and each time I walked into the room it would clamp shut, making the prospect of butchering it all the more painful. Mary was appalled by the thought that the oyster had become a kind of companion.

I downed a glass of Muscadet for nerve, reflected on the Dutch paintings and vanitas, while guessing at how old the oyster was. Maybe thirty? Certainly, neither Henry VIII nor Napoleon would hesitate to eat this oyster, though “Party Girls” might. I quickly cut the abductor muscle, and the oyster soon lay open, a veritable quarry: liver, gills, and mantle along with the rest of its nutritious anatomy. I honored the rare oyster and ate the sumptuous creature raw.

Check our blog regularly for future reports from Jeffrey Greene on his search for wild edibles. His book The Golden-Bristled Boar will be available in paperback in April.

Sign up now for our newsletter to receive news of our latest titles in Virginia history and culture, special deals, and a chance to win a free copy of Mapping Virginia.