“He’s in the tiny shack just behind the even smaller one.”
A road worker told me where to find the South Bristol swing bridge operator. The 78-foot span was built in 1933 to provide land vehicles passage to Rutherford Island, Maine, over “The Gut,” a narrow slot of water between the open ocean and the enclosed haven used by area fishing boats.
It would have been a great picture, the Red-tailed Hawk perched at the end of the old barn’s peak. I stopped the car and got one shot, but she was too far the lens.
As I switched to the longer glass, she took wing directly toward me, perhaps 10 feet off the ground. I think I have never had one fly so close. By the time I mounted the lens, the bird had disappeared behind me.
I think she knew, the way, many years ago, a young woman knew as she pulled her white Corvette beside my van on Interstate 70 and waved. Her hair streamed in the wind. Her eyes twinkled above a smile that offered a suggestion of warmth and mirth. As she pulled away, I noticed her license plate. N UR DRMS, it said.
I am certain I saw the same twinkle in that hawk’s eye as she winged past me.
Let’s call him Jimmy. He is 31, more or less, from the town in which his father and mother were born. As a youngster, he knew nearly everyone within a mile or so of his home, and several who lived farther away. He rode his bicycle around the town, the way some kids where I live ride their bikes around Gettysburg.
“Sometimes we stacked concrete blocks in an alley, to hold up the end of a two-by-ten board,” he said. “Then we raced our bikes to see who could jump the longest.”
“I usually won,” the now father of four boasts.
The early morning thermometer registers 69F. The days have been in the high 80s to mid-90s, amazingly hot for September. The night approaches when we will dream of days as warm as we now wish them cool, when the whole-house fan sucks cool air in the bedroom window and pushes the late afternoon swelter out the roof vent.
A reader invited me to try to photograph a pair of owls that had become regular visitors to his backyard. As luck would have it, other things took control of my evenings. I have not recently even heard owls in the vicinity. Likely they have departed for other climes, as have many other birds that have colored the view from my studio at the edge of the woods.
Continue reading Birds, favorite TV shows, make way for Fall
Here on the East Coast, the lawn mowing season is winding down. A little earlier each day the sky looks like a storm brewing. Times have changed; I need less time each day to recognize it’s not a storm, but the westering sun that causes the early-graying sky.
Here in South Central Pennsylvania, those of us who do not regularly water our greenery find it still needs a periodic trim, but not like the rain-pressured growth that bogged down the Troy-Bilt when we returned in July from a wedding in Florida.
Continue reading Wastewater: a deceptively valuable commodity
In another life, another state, Mom came home one afternoon and told me about a van parked beside the road a couple hundred yards from our driveway. You notice things like that out in the country, where no one lives except you. You cannot pretend the vehicle might belong to someone visiting your neighbor because you don’t have any neighbors. Not within walking distance of the parked van, anyway.
So I went out to look around, and discovered someone had been using a hand saw to cut birch trees into four-foot logs, then loading them into the van and selling them at the mill in town, for about $70 a cord, where they would be sliced into veneer to cover particle board bedroom furniture and make it look expensive.
When the EPA turned Colorado’s Animas river yellow, Republicans launched an all out offensive. Early this month, workers for the federal watchdog poked a hole in a wall blocking the outflow of effluent from the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colo.
The online political magazine “The Hill” reported the agency was playing defense as GOP lawmakers attacked it for causing the outpouring of toxic fluid, and then not holding itself “to the same standards as private companies that pollute.” For a few days, one of the most picturesque rivers in the American West resembled a flow of used mustard after EPA workers released millions of gallons of trapped poison from the mine – a situation the EPA normally is charged with preventing.
It occurs to me the EPA, contrary to opponents’ claims, has held itself tightly to private company standards. The federal, public, agency, once it was faced with the impossibility of disguising all those miles of once beautiful river turned baby-poop yellow, circled the wagons and began following a script with which many reporters are too familiar.
It was night at the edge of the woods, the first night in awhile the sky has been so clear. We settled back in the water to watch for shooting stars, a.k.a the Perseids.
The Perseids is an annual shower of dust and ice trailing from Swift-Tuttle, a comet that whips around us every 133 years, leaving a trail of comet-junk in its wake for us to pass through on our own annual trip around the sun. As those pieces succumb to the gravity of our Terran planet, they burn up in the friction of our atmosphere – and no, they do not get to the ground – normally. If you’re watching the sky and you see a “shooting star” and it disappears while it’s still high in the sky, it is gone and did not collide with Spaceship Earth.
I’ve captured some amazing specimens while out bird hunting (with the Nikon camera), but when I looked at the images of the mostly tawny body, crested head and black bandit mask I’d captured the other day on South Mountain, I darn near danced. I’d always had a sneaking suspicion Cedar waxwings existed only in the Hallmark store, like the ornament my sister sent me as a tree decoration one recent Christmas. Until the other day, on South Mountain.
Cedar waxwings live in Pennsylvania year-round, but their population thins as one looks southerly on a map. According to my bird book, they can be found in winter as far south as Georgia, and seem to favor small mountains and berry bushes. I found them at nearly 1,900 feet above sea level, in a spot where a nearly non-existent breeze was made stronger and cooler as it channeled up a dent in the ridge. That breeze and the blueberry barrens near where I found them was what drew them.
Last week, an unmanned spaceship named New Horizons, nine months after departing Earth, zipped within 8,000 miles of our last planet, and continued on toward … well, we’re really not sure what it will find. But that’s the point of such trips, isn’t it.
In the same week, while peering through a telescope we’ve stationed about 93 million miles from the site of a certain well-known terran battlefield, we found, a mere 1,400 light-years from the same battlefield, a planet that might support life as we know it. Imagine a civilization out there staring back at this blue marble we are riding, wondering whether anyone lives here.
The 17-foot Old Town Tripper canoe glides easily across the water. A light blue sky mirrors off the surface, blocking the subsurface view in any direction but straight down. A tweak of the Moose polarizer on the end of the camera lens blocks the reflection; suddenly a large Smallmouth bass hovers above a patch of water-weed.
This time of year, a younger me would be swimming a quarter-mile and back across another lake, through the place where a spring created a cold spot – where the upwelling water would make that the last spot to freeze come winter. But there are laws, or at least local ordinances, against swimming in water that isn’t chemicalized and confined by concrete shores. A state regulator once told me we humans exude our medications into the water supply, and treatment plants cannot keep up with removing them.
Continue reading An unpalatable trade
Watching the clouds drift in, and I watch them drift away again. (With apologies, or at least a nod, to Otis Redding.)
A Downy Woodpecker arrived, stopping to check a fence post for bugs, prompting a pair of House Sparrows to break away from the feeder to assume guard positions at the bird house mounted at the top of the post. Unsatisfied, the Downy moved away, and tried to rustle up some grub from nearby tomato stakes.
The national network news reported a young women shot and killed July 1 on a San Francisco pier. She was reportedly out for a stroll with her dad and a family friend.
The shooter, police said, was a Mexican citizen, deported from this country five times. From news reports, the crimes that resulted in his previous deportations were possession of marijuana and being here without permission. He was free to walk the streets last week because, though he had been charged with possession of $20 worth of marijuana, he had been released to await further court action. San Francisco is a so-called “sanctuary city” with laws prohibiting turning illegal aliens over to federal immigration authorities upon their release from prison resulting from non-violent charges.
The aircraft took off from Nagoya, Japan, Sunday on a planned 120-hour flight to Hawaii. Clearly, it is not out for a speed record; it was cruising at a ground speed of about 10 miles an hour when I watched it online.
In 2010, the craft flew a then-record breaking 26 consecutive hours. When it landed, it reportedly had enough battery left for another six hours in the air. Only five years later, the flight from Japan to Hawaii is scheduled for nearly five times as long. The goal is a 13-segment flight around the world – a seemingly easy feat for nearly any four-motored aircraft – except this one is powered by the sun.
Solar panels on the wings and fuselage charge the batteries during the day, while the airplane climbs as high as 30,000 feet. Then during the night, it runs the battery-powered motors in a long, slow, descent. Along the way, pilot and CEO André Borschberg snatches 20-minute naps.
I‘m a bit mixed about banning speech, but I lean mostly toward don’t do it. Sure, there are things I wish people wouldn’t say, but banning speech really doesn’t accomplish anything, other than to drive the sentiments underground.[pullquote]“Those pictures were not selfies. Someone took those pictures.” – NPR reporter Gwen Ifill [/pullquote]
We all learn to disguise what we think other people do not want to hear us say. I used to visit a certain home and listen to “goldurn” this and “goshdarn” that. Did they really think the god they claimed was all seeing didn’t get that they’d merely disguised the word they really meant.
It was a dark and stormy night.
The day had started the way a nice motorcycling day should start, sunny but not too much heat. My then 13-year-old son and I had spent two nights at Locust Lake State Park, near Mahanoy City, Pa. The stop had given us a tour of a coal breaker plant. LJ came away with a small bag of samples, one piece for every size the plant broke and sorted: stove, nut, pea, barley, and buckwheat, in order of size. I think.[pullquote]“I don’t see anything,” he said.
“That’s it,” I said.[/pullquote]
We ate at a diner on Main Street, populated mostly by old men who enthralled my eldest offspring with stories of the glory days of anthracite coal. It was they who told us of the Blaschak coal breaker at west end of town.
Continue reading Anthracite black blankets and rustling leaves
Gettysburg, in west-central Adams County, Pa. takes pride in being “the most famous small town in the world.” It is slightly more than one and-a-half square miles, and has 16 traffic lights within its boundary.[pullquote]“Then she looked up.
At the green light.”[/pullquote]
There are a few more traffic lights in the county, most to the east of the borough, a couple to the north – but none to the west (not counting the light on U.S.30 northwest of the borough. That is about to change. A traffic light is planned for installation in Hamiltonban Township, barely across the town line at the west edge of the tiny borough of Fairfield.
Continue reading First stop light in (that part of) the county
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. That line has rolled around in my ear for days, though my calendar is nearing summer and Robert Frost wrote “Snowy Evening” about a woods filling with snow.
[pullquote]the floor is carpeted with last year’s leaves and this year’s ferns[/pullquote]Butterflies, small ones, like miniature Emperor Moths only drab-hued, flitter around clover blossoms. Higher in the trees, a flicker of yellow catches my eye, and is gone. I would like to believe it was a Monarch, because they are becoming scarce, but I didn’t see it well enough.
Closer in, and on or near the ground, several Red Spotted purple butterflies, so called because they are purple, mostly, with red spots among white accent marks, search the duff for goodies. They seem afraid of heights; I rarely see them higher than a few feet. Mostly, they seem to favor the edges of dirt roads and, at the lake, open pebbly beach areas with tall-grass surrounds. Continue reading Fantasyland just down the road
One of the many things I’ve learned is a truly good wandering companion cannot be bought. I have tried, and none have worked out. On he other hand, there have been three …
I met Dutch at a friend’s house on Adak, an island about halfway out the Aleutian Islands chain. One day, Dutch – a Yellow Lab and Irish Setter mix – wanted to go home with me. It turned out my friend was leaving the island, and Dutch could not accompany him.
The situation repeated two years later, when it was my turn to depart, but in those 24 months, Dutch and I were nearly inseparable. We wandered the tundra, and when I would go to the store he waited outside – allowing passers-by to stop and pet him, but never leaving his place by the door.
I, and my faithful companion Grady the Golden, wander along our favorite stream, among the vestiges of the Spring Transition.
Water gurgles and splashes over stones and boulders into a pool where a pair of Mallards paddle lazily. In a few weeks, they will be leading a brood of youngsters.[pullquote]… an owl hoo-hoo-hoooos. I flatter myself to think he’s laughing at me …[/pullquote]
Around another curve, a sextet of Canada geese hurry away. They are shy, sort of, like a group of prima donnas that want to be seen, but not looked at – and certainly not photographed.