The moon the past few nights has been amazingly bright, like a humongous LED spotlight angling down through the trees, casting stick shadows on the grass and across my desk.
A couple hundred yards away, an owl hoots, perhaps celebrating his having found dinner scurrying among the shadows. Bats, as soon as the night air warms toward summer, will cling to the trees by day, to come among the shadows in the evening and feast on bugs that have been feasting on me. Payback is heck, I’ve heard said.
It’s spring, and young men’s fancy turns to thoughts of attracting young women’s attention. One may be the best at what he does, but it’s of no consequence if first he doesn’t gain the attention of prospective suitors. Watching the spring show at the lake is all about the boys striving for attention.
I was reminded last weekend of a certain young man of my brood who exhibited much the same activity when spring called boys and girls to doff their furs and leggings in favor of more demonstrative attire. He did have a physique I had never enjoyed, and would daily go to the gym on Main Street to pump iron and build rivers of sweat. Girls, their hormones telling them to pay attention, stood at the plate glass window and admired his effort.
Several years ago, when I was in the daily news game covering a school district near my home, came a discussion of the districts indebtedness and its need for a new elementary school. The district had undertaken a large number of improvements, and was about maxed out on what it could get its taxpayers to cough up.
“Never fear,” the superintendent told his Board of Directors. “According to state law, the new school won’t cost us anything.”
“With our debt load limited out, the state will pay for everything,” he said.
My on-the-road navigator really is quite competent – as far as getting me to addresses I might not be able to find on my own. She is very accurate when she estimates my arrival time, even when the trip is several hundred miles.
Sometimes, though, the windshield-mounted GPS we named Sally G just doesn’t have a clue. Thus it was that she took me 30 minutes by the regular highway beyond my intended destination Sunday, landing me in Frostburg, Md., instead of tiny Oldtown.
On the other hand, I would not have driven around a particular curve on Md. 51, past the post office at Spring Gap, population 55 in the 2010 census. I don’t know where those 55 people were hiding, though some of them probably lived in the home beside the post office. The next closest sign of habitation – a Methodist church and a general store – lay some distance south.
Springtime color is beginning to flow over the range. A Red-bellied Woodpecker just landed atop the swingset. It is a distinctive creature, its back a mosaic of black bands and white triangles. A bright red skullcap extends back to its shoulders. My books report there is some red on its belly, but rarely is it visible.
A few Northern Mockingbirds have dropped by, while overhead Snow and Canada geese head for their nesting grounds. These are welcome signs, dulling the sharp pain of cabin fever.
Wind blowing across the frozen lake has carved a thin layer of snow into hard-packed ripples, like white mud that has flowed down a hill during spring thaw. The granddaughter and her young friend make tracks across the ripples, then take running starts to slide across the ice where the snow has blown clear and polished the glassine surface.
It’s downright balmy out as I consider these thoughts. The thermometer claims about 45 F, and there’s a breeze blowing across what is left of a 30-inch blizzard that blanketed us just over a week ago. The raised-garden frames, themselves only about 10 inches high, are well exposed. There is weather outside my window, and it’s not bad.
My mother used to watch the weather forecast every night. She would announce, “It’s time for the news,” and take her place on the end of the couch.
But it wasn’t the news that interested her. She would talk through the news. In fact, one could say when the news was on TV was the time for news of the family and people we knew. One might call it “back fence time,” only we didn’t have a back fence, and if we had, there were no neighbors close enough to lean on it.
Marsh Creek, a short distance from my home, is bloated like a certain writer who has partaken overmuch of turkey and ice cream at a family dinner. Rain pours down on the tableau, filling the myriad tributaries that flow into the creek like an array of gravy and soup bowls, each adding ingredients they have collected from minor hills and valleys in the larger creek’s watershed.
Just over a week ago, a snowstorm laid a biodegradable covering across the scene. Now the rain melds it into the water that is its main ingredient, expanding the creek to a degree the spring and summer feeder streams will not.
Continue reading What if Marsh Creek was in Flint or Uniontown
“The sky is falling!” That’s the cry around my home whenever the rain or snow comes down upon us. Tuesday afternoon, the sky was falling in a great white cloud of snow. Fifteen minutes after it began, it was over, leaving white patches on the still-green grass where the ground was a little colder than other places.
The mini-blizzard lasted long enough for a little girl whose home I passed on the way home to put on her coat with the hood and dash outside. She jumped off the porch to the sidewalk and, tilting her head up with her tongue out as far as it would stretch, started catching snowflakes.
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.” – Naturalist and preservationist John Muir, 1838-1914
The quote received a bit of supporting illumination from the Environmental Protection Agency this week – a little reminder that this great life-system of which we humans are part is a sophisticated (some might say complicated) bit of cosmic machinery.
In a report published Wednesday (Jan. 6, 2016), the EPA said it has figured out what is killing honey bees. The culprit (or one of the culprits), it seems, is neonicotinoids-based pesticides. That has been a suspicion in some quarters as an explanation for what is generally termed “colony collapse disorder.”
A few days ago, I told my 12-year-old granddaughter she had no immediate worry about rising sea levels. We live about 500 feet above sea level, and the level at the eastern seashore is predicted to rise only a few inches by the end of the century.
I lied.
It’s nearly the end of December. It is technically winter but in eastern Canada, lots of ducks and geese are saving their energy for making more ducks and geese by not flying south until the lakes ice over, which so far they have not.
We humans, on the other hand, can bend our environment to our wishes. We think we can simply manufacture more food and housing and we will be OK. So far, we have been able to pull it off. By some accounts, the next three decades are going to make water very expensive in some parts of the nation.
The previous night’s snow had coated the forest with foot-deep powder, silencing the footsteps of the three hunters – my brother and I and our father, in the annual quest for a Christmas tree. It was like being in a sound-proofed studio – that weird, echoless sensation of walking alone in an enchanted world.
“Look at this one, Daddy,” my brother exclaimed.
“Shake the snow off it and let’s see,” the elder replied.
I am diabetic. It’s no big deal, relative to the millions of other folks making Big Pharma rich with sales of antidotes to the sugar-water guzzling ways of our early years. I would go to bed with a bowl of corn chips, a bowl of salsa, a Pepsi in a Big Gulp cup, and television. Now I take, among a small smorgasbord of medications, metformin, a.k.a. Glucophage. It’s one of the mainstays of the diabetes treatment industry.
The flock of mallards launched from the creek, reminding me that a bright orange vest might be a good safety idea during deer season, but not so great if one is trying to slip up on the ducks. Indeed, most birds have excellent eyesight. They require it. Unlike ground-locked critters that can lie low and wait to spot something moving, birds are the movers, and sometimes quite fast. If they are going to eat – or at least not be eaten – they must spot their targets a long way off and make quick friend-or-food decisions.
A stack of firewood forms the rungs of a ladder leading from the cold dark depths of winter to the gloriously warm, bright heights of spring. The past few days have clearly illustrated the cold dark depths. On the other hand, several people of my acquaintance would say, “At least it ain’t snow.”
I can almost smell the mincemeat and apple pies, sitting on the porch rail to cool, and woe to the child who even contemplated poking a finger in one before The Big Meal.
In my youth, this was an aromatic week, culminating in a table full of turkey, at least one type of squash (and I love them all, in sooth), a humungous bowl of mashed potatoes, a heaping pile of hand-squooshed biscuits and a bowl of cranberry sauce. When cranberry sauce became available in cans, Mom was sure anyone who used the stuff would be consigned to the lower reaches of the eternal furnace.
The ad for a big-screen television shows a picture of a still, blue lake. A canoe is pulled up on its shore. In the background, a stand of pine trees of indeterminate species frames one side, a fall-colored mountain range the other. You can almost hear the loons calling each other across the water, as they have done for thousands of years, maybe longer.
The day I quit tobacco was sunny and warm. Beyond that, I remember only that it was the summer that Travel Partner No. 2 and I were still dating.
I tried cigarettes when I was in about seventh or eighth grade. I swiped some from Dad’s supply. A few of us slipped off down a trail behind the two-room school house and tried to impress each other with our hoped-for manhood. If inhaling Dad’s Marlboros was a ticket to manhood, I was doomed to stay with Peter Pan’s Lost Boys.
A few years later, I was in the Navy. Cigars – especially big, fat, Bering Plazas, seemed cool and, along with my mustache, they made me look older. Sandy, a.k.a. Travel Partner No. 1, was two years older than I, and would become visibly unhappy when she got carded in some nice wine-and-dine establishments, while I, at 19, was never questioned.
Continue reading In which are extinguished smoking pachyderms …
I went swimming in Marsh Creek last week. It wasn’t a planned exercise, but it was instructive. Global warming, it seems, has reached Adams County – a fact I had only suspected until, an hour after the impromptu dive, I’d not frozen to death.
We had gone canoeing on the creek, me with a camera – which attained a starring role in the story to follow.
I recently spent part of a week-long vacation watching the ocean come and go, while a friend and fellow journalist attempted renewing a relationship with what last year had become his pet seagull. The incoming tides smashed and crashed against a huge rectangular boulder about the size of twin Chevrolet Carryalls stacked one atop the other. Every half-dozen or so waves would match timing and reinforce to send spray 30 to 40 feet in the air. But unlike the Chevy trucks, the rock notably did not move when several tons of ocean slammed into it’s side.
In front of and beside the granite outcrop, a hundred or so Common Eider ducks swam and dove for food stirred up by the incoming tide. As is usual (though there are exceptions), Eider males are the flashiest of the species. Their raiment is in starkly contrasting black and white. The women of the species clothe in finery of mostly gray and brown. Now and then, one or the other would stand up on the water to rearrange its wings, like someone rising from the dinner table to pull down a jacket or blouse. Then back to the bottom for another small fish or mussel.