(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 4/18/2014)
The world is coming alive with the warmth and light of Spring – this week’s below-freezing day notwithstanding.
A little bit ago, there was a bird singing loudly in joy at the edge of my back yard. I couldn’t find him to discover his name or photograph his appearance, but it was enough to hear his robust love song.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 4/4/2014)
I finally gave up trying to keep the House Sparrows out of the bluebird house. For about three days.
I feel badly for them, trying to set up a home outside my studio window. They are mid-1800 immigrants to this country from the Mediterranean Sea shores, by way of Europe. I’ve read they were a pest in China; Chairman Mao tried to eradicate them thinking it would make more grain available for his burgeoning human population.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 3/21/2014)
An article in the Gettysburg Times reported on “Discovery Gettysburg,” a 2,000-unit housing development proposed for the intersection of US15 and PA394 (Shrivers Corners Road).
It’s a fact that residential growth is the most expensive when compared to agricultural and industrial. For one thing, each new worker living in a residential development occupies a separate home; the same number of employees work together in stores, factories or office buildings.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 3/7/2014)
A friend told me this week it has been so cold where she lives, kids have been complaining their cell phone keypads have been freezing. They have had to wait until second period before the keys have thawed enough they can be used to text the youngster across the aisle to set a lunch meeting in the school cafeteria.
Being without a working cell phone is rough, but I guess it is all relative. I bet my daughter remembers being unable to satisfactorily explain the necessity of tying up the home phone to talk to friends with whom she had just spent the day at school. Even that was B.C. – Before Cell.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 2/21/2014)
I was sitting here doing what I do when I heard a truck backup alarm on my street. There are not many trucks with backup alarms on this street, so I got up to peek out the window – to see the Cumberland Township plow stopped, and the driver walking back to where a neighbor was helping an 80-something gent back to his house through the snow.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 2/14/2014)
A few days ago, the first Eastern Bluebird of the season wandered into the yard. I watched as what I am pretty sure was a Tufted Titmouse sat on a branch and dug a peanut from its shell. I’ve been told robins have been seen in Littlestown. It’s seasonal shift change in the bird kingdom.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 2/7/2014)
My grandkids never have experienced swimming across lake and finding a cold spot in the warm water, a spring gushing water up from the bottom. I know exactly the location of that spring; as a youngster I swam the half-mile across the lake, over the very spot. There is something about feeling the life of the water, and knowing why that particular place is last to freeze in winter or where, since the lake never floods, the water goes next.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 1/24/2014)
Winters of my youth I remember being way more snowy than those of more recent vintage. I mentioned to an old guy one day that as cold and snowy as it now seems, there was a time when by late October the snow would came up to my, uh, posterior.
He offered the possibility that my posterior was closer to the ground in those days – but I remember being 17 and one afternoon at the start of hunting season pushing my way downhill through the snow below Bates’ farm, hoping to flush a deer out of the pines at the edge of the pasture. Instead, I bagged a pair of Partridge for dinner.
If this would come all at once, it could be an over and done problem. This winter is up to 22 inches, but it keeps coming down a little at a time and going away.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 12/13/2013)
Ever since the calendar flipped into December, there has been a singular goal on my spouse’s mind.
Selecting our Christmas conifer from offerings of the “40 and 8” – a club associated with the American Legion – was a tradition born many years ago, when my not-yet spouse, a Registered Nurse, discovered the club used its profits to fund scholarships for student nurses.
Alas, the “40 and 8” begins selling on the first weekend in December. The first day of the month fell on Sunday, so that weekend didn’t count. The following Saturday morning came the quiet query: “Papa John (a title bestowed by a granddaughter some years ago), can I have a Christmas tree?”
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 11/15/2013)
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Bats are cool. They hibernate in winter, and in warmer months pump their leathery wings in pursuit of tons of, to me, bothersome bugs. Without bats, I’d miss out on the entertainment of the little critters flapping around the vacant lot next door, and instead spend my evening outdoor time swatting mosquitoes, masking the scent of forest with the aroma of citronella.
In one place I lived, a decade or so ago, we had a bat sharing our domicile. No sign of him during the day, but come night he’d flap around the bedroom. At first, my spouse didn’t like the idea, and wanted to catch him in a towel to take him outside.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 11/8/2013)
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Most of the color is gone along the creek, save some chicory-like bushes with red berries, and the occasional pin oak (I think). One crimson-plated youngster, an American Chestnut, maybe, or a Chestnut Oak or even a Big Tooth Aspen, stands alone among lesser, already nude specimens.
Though I spent my childhood years wandering through the thousands of wooded acres around my parents’ home, I am only beginning to recognize the trees by their leaves. I can tell by the bark, but I never paid much attention to leaf forms, satisfying myself with being amazed merely by the diversity of shapes and shades.
A few years ago, we turned out a large portion of the wastrels in the state legislature. We The People were nearly uniformly unhappy with lawmakers who had, in the dark of night, given themselves a payraise.
[pullquote]Unfortunately for the majority that does not vote, we too often have government by minority rule.[/pullquote]
In the district of my home, our representative seemed to have a different excuse for each audience. He voted for it because he couldn’t stop it, he said. Besides, judges deserved a long-overdue payraise. He deserved a raise to pay for his lawyering education which, he said – after 12 years of being, by his own admission, essentially legislatively useless – would make him more effective representative of his district.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 10/25/2013)
The three-year-old took his dad and me to the zoo this week. The little guy is a chick magnet. Everywhere we went, he was so happy playing with dad, laughing and grinning, that young ladies 100 yards away were looking at him and smiling. Which caused them to look at me and smile because they knew I was with Peter, and Peter’s an obviously really cool little guy.
[pullquote]There’s something really great about watching a youngster discover new things, even – maybe especially – when he has no real idea what he has discovered.[/pullquote]
First it was a ride on the Metro to Washington, then lunch outside the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Peter loves dinosaurs, and he knows which skull is the Triceratops and which the T. Rex. He found a Pterodactyl, which he properly identified as a bird, and oohed over the monsters behind the glass of a miniature Jurassic Park.
Continue reading Discovering dinosaurs, and other life forms
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 10/11/2013)
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One of the highlights of a week-long conference I recently attended in Chattanooga, Tenn. was a bus trip a few miles north, to the Kingston Fossil Plant, one of 11 coal-fired electricity generating plants owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The plant burns coal to turn water into steam to drive generators to provide electricity to about 540,000 homes.
It also was the site, in the early morning of December 22, 2008, of a massive release of coal ash into nearby rivers and a lake. Without warning – at least without warning considered by plant managers, an 84-acre pile of ash broke loose to befoul the waters below – and above – the plant. The ash mass hit the Emory River with such force the downstream flow could not immediately absorb it, so the ash, and the river it rode, flowed backward several miles, and created “ashbergs” in the watercourse.
Continue reading Firing fossils: messy, expensive, and too often deadly
I am returned home from a six-day conference, counting travel, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, during which I saw little of the city whilst I mingled with fellow recorders of “environmental” tales and observations. It was an informative sojourn, full of camaraderie and information, at least some of which we members of the Society of Environmental Journalists each hope will add value and color to our future musings.
But I was impressed, in what limited exposure I had, with the uncity-ness of the historic burg.
Continue reading Electric buses, u-rent bicycles, and fish at the brink of extinction
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 10/4/2013)
Well before most Pennsylvania residents were aware of a natural gas industry north of the Gulf of Mexico, it was taking root in the Commonwealth. “Fracking Pennsylvania: Flirting with Disaster,” by Walter M. Brasch, is the story of that enterprise.
The narrative begins in 2000, when Mitchell Energy, with help from the U.S. Department of Energy, finally proved that extracting natural gas from shale a mile and-a-half below the state’s surface was a practical – read profitable – undertaking.
Continue reading Fracking Pennsylvania: Flirting with Disaster
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 9/20/2013)
When the merits of “sustainable” growth are mentioned, the parts most often left out of the hype are more roads to maintain, more schools to build, more police, fire and emergency medical services to provide.
And more water to drink.
More water – two million gallons a day – is what some directors of Gettysburg Municipal Authority would have its customers believe they need to buy from York Water Company. Continue reading Important questions blanket GMA’s quest to buy York water
Peavine bought himself a new walking stick. A dandy specimen it is, too – a really nice five-section telescoping stick with a compass on top. Each section is accented with, in his case, a bright orange ring.
He bought it, he said, because it came in orange. It also is available in black, blue, green, purple, red, gold and titanium, but as long as we’ve been hanging around together, I’ve never known Peavine to go for those flashy colors. Besides, orange is a good color in the woods because deer can’t see it. Continue reading A new walking stick
First printed in the Gettysburg Times, 7/19/2013)
The TV reporter stands in Manhattan, NYC, telling us the temperature where she is standing is 97F. A couple blocks away, in Central Park, it’s only 92, she says.
What she does not mention is Central Park is an island of trees and grass. She is standing, sweating, amid pavement, buildings and motor vehicles together pouring rivers of heat into their already oven-like ambiance. Continue reading A little less black(top), please