HINTS AT WINTER

Ridges, individual stones and other shapes are made distinct by dustings of snow.   Those dustings, adding up, I suppose, to two or three inches, are all we have had so far.  The snow shovel is leaning against the side of our front door, our tractor has been converted from grass cutter to snow blower, so we are prepared.  The blower, alas, is still virginal; last year it arrived two days after that single day-before-Thanksgiving storm, and wasn’t needed for the rest of the winter.  There is nothing on the horizon except flurries.  The webcam at Sugarbush, where we have season tickets this year, shows white slopes now–­at last–and touts good conditions on some slopes, but the weather is still above freezing here (where we keep seeing rain and mist) and we are not yet motivated to head over the mountain.   Of course, all this could change.

An early snow covering a portion of our frozen pond

Visitors are appreciated at a dark time of year.  There are fewer options for outdoor fun, and what there is needs to be squeezed into the early part of the day as the light, meager at best on some days, begins to fade completely by 4 o’clock.  Shortly after Thanksgiving Michele, once our neighbor in Lexington, came up.  (She now lives in Falmouth, others neighbors moved to Paris, and several others sold and moved elsewhere, all in the last year.  Our old neighborhood, in other words, no longer exists.  Après nous–– rien!)   And from Australia, by way of Montréal, we were visited by Stephanie and Micah, Stephanie being–this sounds distant and complicated–a granddaughter of my late cousin George and wife Nelly.  We had last seen Stephanie when she had newly graduated from high school in Australia on our last trip there in 2004.

Stephanie (who saw snow for the first time in Canada) prepares a snowball for Micah

More visitors:  Birds have been the visiting the bird feeder (and suet, above) in large numbers, emptying it every other day.  We have seen what I guess is the usual:  countless finches and chickadees, several woodpeckers, bluejays, cardinals, nuthatches, mourning doves, titmouses (titmice?), and a somewhat uncommon white winged crossbill.  Ken, who has taken on the job of feeder servicing, can hardly keep up.  He has a daily battle with some persistent squirrels.  One squirrel, perhaps frustrated and annoyed by the tape Ken put over the feeder lid after he or a buddy of his had pried it open several times, jumped onto the window sill one morning, looked directly at Ken who was sitting in a chair near the window, and gave him a long, hard look.

The squirrel, frustrated, contemplates his next move.

In the woods behind our house, a barred owl.

As for other animals, a footnote on “In Deer Season.”  According to our local newspaper, Vermont’s deer herd grew by 2,000 this past year from last year’s 125,000.   (By way of reference, there are some 626,000 people in the state of Vermont.  How many hunters?)  The number of deer weighed in (that is to say, killed) during deer season this year was 405 in Addison County, an increase of about 23% from 2011, the second highest number since 2003. Young hunters (who only need to be old enough to know how to handle a rifle–there's no bottom age limit–and have taken a gun safety course, and no older than 16) took 124 deer.  Young hunters can shoot does, or pretty much any deer of any size (an ethical choice, I suppose), although adults can only hunt bucks.  

***

There is shooting, and there is hunting, and the differences are large.  Still, those words conjure up other images, unbidden.

Thoughts turn to peace, to family, at this time of year, the world, our world, still in shock after the deaths of so many very young innocent children in Connecticut.  It seems fitting to end with another poem, written several years ago.

If I Ruled the World – Olin Goudey (at age 8)

If I ruled the world

It would be innocents

Comforting young ones

            There would be love

            There would be love

Separating the best words,

The old and the young

Are now free

            There would be love

Closing the unpleasant truth

Peace and love in one thing

Seeing the white bird fly

            There would be love.

IN DEER SEASON

                       “That time of year thou mayst in me behold

                        When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

                        Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

                        Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

                 (The first lines of W.S.’s Sonnet 73)

Beautiful as it was here in the early fall, there’s much to be said about this pre-winter time as well.  There have been many chilly desolate-seeming days and dark nights occasionally filled with the yelps of coyotes, enough to make you shiver, or even blacker nights and mornings when the air is so still it’s almost spooky. 

Snow showers whiten the high peaks of the Adirondacks

Sometimes early morning frost appears to cover the landscape with a sugary mist.  The air is usually perfectly still in these post-dawn hours, and so every feature seems momentarily immobilized, flash-frozen in place.  Your footsteps in the grass leave prints as the grass seems to fold and break under your feet–your footsteps the only sign that you have not walked into a still photograph.

Early morning footprints in the frost

Now you can see the shapes of things.  Buildings appear that had been hidden all spring and summer. Now you know there are rocky ledges in the woods behind our house. Now you can see the shapes of the branches.  The meadow is still bright green and the grass short, easy to walk through, thanks to farmer Dan’s second cutting.  (His square baler is still in a corner of the field with a half-compacted bale stuck inside; we guess the equipment gave out when he was just about done and the effort to fix it and pull it out was something he hasn’t have the time for.)  The pond is full again, thanks to plenty of recent rain.

A thin layer of ice covers the pond

Hunting season for deer began last week.  (Rifle deer season–bucks only–runs from November 10 to November 25.)   Although the land directly behind our house is posted (“No Hunting”) just behind and a bit more to the south the land is open to hunting.  It’s considered wise to wear bright colors (that is to say, it's considered stupid not to wear some hunter’s orange) when hunting or even walking in the woods off trail during rifle season.  We have seen deer behind the house, near the woods, and have seen plenty of signs that they bed down–or used to, anyway–in the copse at the edge of our property.  (Large areas of flattened grass where they lay down, and bent over grass that marked their paths in and out.) 

The first day of deer hunting season we heard a couple of shots early in the morning.  Sure enough, it was Chris, son-in-law and neighbor, who bagged a good-sized buck.  Ken’s grandson Spencer hunts too, and has tried his luck in the woods behind our house, but without success so far.  He was luckier last year hunting near his home in Bristol.  I love venison, but I would never be able to shoot a deer.  I just couldn't do it.

Chris with his deer that manages to look as if it were still alive.

The challenge is always to get a good clean shot, ideally one that drops the deer with a single bullet.  Once down, the deer is gutted where it falls (food for coyotes or other animals) lightening considerably the amount of deer to drag home.  This is no minor consideration, especially if you’re hunting alone.  At the weighing station (where you must report shooting bear, deer, turkey or moose) Chris’ deer was found to weigh 165 pounds, minus innards, of course.  

Here is Chris' description:“I shot it in the swamp at the exact location that I have had success on two other occasions.  It was not far from the field, so I dragged it through the woods and into the field.  Once Audrey and Ben joined me we dragged it to the back corner of our property where Audrey then had the idea to get the kids’ plastic sled, and it worked wonderfully.  We then took it over the horse bridge and up past the barn.  I loaded it into the brand new mini-van (!) with a tarp under it and some blankets, just in case.  Ben actually went with me to the New Haven general store and was very helpful in getting the deer out of the car and onto the weighing scale.  And yes, while I certainly could have unlawfully just hung the deer in my barn and gone back out hunting the next day, the law requires me to tear my deer tag off my license and check it in at an official station where they register the deer, when and where it was taken, etc.”

Yes, that deer is heavy!  (Audrey, giving it a try.)

Audrey and Ben pose with the deer (which still looks alive).  Audrey (a future veterinarian?)
will probably not eat any of the meat even though she helped her dad with the deer.

Audrey, just a few days later, looking on as animal behaviorist Temple Grandin
signs her book following a lecture at UVM.

There is no shortage of wildlife even though finding an opportunity for a clear shot at a buck is chancy.  An infrared-sensing camera that Spencer mounted on a tree last summer that recorded several bears and numerous deer is testimony to that.

Some other animals met their end this month as well.  Lesley raised some 30 chickens for eating this fall, in addition to the egg-layers.  Chickens raised for eating are an entirely different creature than egg-layers.  They eat and drink themselves silly, becoming basketball-sized lumps in a matter of a very few short months.  Their breasts become so large their legs can barely support them.  A couple of them died prematurely (that is, before their scheduled deaths at the slaughterhouse), most likely from heart failure, like overweight humans.  Five of these birds now reside in our freezer.

The meat chickens milling around the feeder, as usual

Brought outdoors, the meat chickens had no idea what to do.

November is a quiet time, really.  One’s focus changes from outdoors to in, and cooking takes up the slack in warmer days filled by gardening. This is the first full month of November we have experienced here.  Last year in this month we were in Africa (so long ago and so far away).  

Since I began with a poem, I'll end with a poem, one neither famous nor old, and not about autumn or about age.  More about youth, in fact. 

                                                  I Miss You 

                                         It was in first grade

                                        When I saw you on the bus

                                        You looked at me

                                        And I saw you write

                                        Something

                                        On a piece of paper.

                                        You gave it to me; I read it.

                                        It was “Love ya!”

                                        I want you to remember me

                                       When you look in the fourth seat.

                                       Now I am in the third grade.

                                       I miss you

                                       I miss you

                                       I miss you

                                       I looked at you in the last row.

                                       I heard someone yell “Harry,”

                                      Sit next to me!”

                                      You did.

                                      Sit next to her.

                                      And you forgot about me.

                                      I miss ya

                                      I miss ya

                                      I miss ya

                                                                                          by Carly Huston, age 8 (now 13) 

BACK IN ANOTHER COUNTRY: AFTER AMAZONIA

A newly mowed field along Plank road

The landscape is so compelling right now that a routine errand like a trip to the supermarket becomes a scenic drive––look at that tree! look at the light!  Even a visit to the dentist brings about the kind of conversation where the subject is the magnificent colors and swirling clouds he saw this morning. It’s so beautiful, he says, that “sometimes you just have to pinch yourself.”  Even in the rain the forest seem to glow.  I don’t remember it being this beautiful last year.  Maybe it was, but maybe we were too distracted by the images of hurricane Irene.

The sugar maples at the Hustons' place

Early morning frost and fog over Lake Champlain

Sometimes you only have to look out the front door...

We have been back from the Amazon for several weeks now.  There’s been plenty of time to readjust to the cool, the early frosts, the lingering sunsets.  And the wind.  There isn’t much wind in the Amazon, a fact that was unexpected, to me, anyway.  But when you think about it, why should there be? There isn’t much weather, no temperature-changing fronts charging through.  It rains, and then the blazing sun is out again.  There is heat and humidity.  Iquitos is three degrees south of the equator.  When were there in late September it was well into the dry season.  (The river flooding won’t begin again until near the end of the year.)

I hadn’t thought much about what it might have been like to visit Iquitos when the season was transitioning from wet to dry.  The big wet took a leap of imagination, but you could picture it:    Lots of rain, the river doubled in width, the streets in low areas functioning as rivers.  Had we been there in the wet we would have visited many sites by boat instead of on foot, including Belén, home to some 25,000 people, among them new arrivals from the jungle, joining the poorest of the poor.  (Our chance guide to Belén had lived there before he worked his way into better circumstances.)  From the water we would have seen its houses on stilts and the houses on balsa logs, now actually afloat.  A commentator (“Iquitosman”* on TripAdvisor) wrote cheerfully, “When the water is navigable, a canoe tour is oddly enjoyable––kind of like Venice on a budget!”  But he knows better, and more, and goes on to describe how “the yearly floodwaters carry the human waste from the open sewage ditches into the lower levels of the houses and vendor areas. The children swim and play while the ladies wash clothes and dishes on the same floating raft as the outhouse.”  Worse yet is the interlude between the wet and the dry:  “The hardest time is when the water is too shallow for the canoe, but ankle deep in slime and (the) contaminated mud hasn't dried completely. When the families begin to clean out the ground level to move back in, the bacteria-contaminated dust fills their lungs and the sickness continues. 

If you visit from February through June, you will likely see some stage of water-related difficulty.”

"What will you see?" he asks.  "Thousands of people, doing the best they can, living the only way they know how.  The poorest of the poor live  there but many have figured out a way to make a better-than-average income; commerce has developed over the years and the innovative people have capitalized on the local needs, and learned how to carve out an existence."  Yet:  "The thieves are as common as the water-borne bacteria.  Even the locals will warn you to hide your camera, sunglasses, or watch while descending into a place that will shock your senses and make you question the balance of your own life and social responsibilities."  

Life is precarious in the Amazon, as elsewhere.  What if the wet season doesn’t last as long as usual?  (Two year ago there was a drought, in Amazonian terms, leaving smaller streams unnavigable.)  What if the waters rise more than normal?  (Last year they rose well above normal, flooding houses that were never flooded before.)  What of the effect of continued logging in unprotected areas?  (We saw the piles of logs awaiting transport along the Iquitos docks.  And we've read about what happens in Brazil.)  What are the limits of growth of a city like Iquitos (growing mightily as people seek better lives, already at 600,000+), and how does protecting the environment fit into a culture of poverty?

What kind of lives will they have?

We are so far from Belén.  

As I write this we are having a bit of “the wet,” a day of heavy rain, but that will only mean that our pond water is high again for the first time in many months.  This land doesn’t seem nearly as fragile.  That’s how it feels, anyway, after being in a place where terra firma is not always to be found. 

End of the season:  cornstalks, ready for cutting

Geese are gathering to fly south.  (This group must be practicing, as their direction is north!)

On the subject, more or less of fragility, a segue:  Sure, weather and extremes brought about by climate change leave people vulnerable.  So, too, of course, the acts of people.  A few months ago I was impressed with a book by Eliza Griswold (a fellow at the New America Foundation and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard) called “The Tenth Parallel.”   While it is about the collisions between Islam and Christianity in many parts of the world (and the huge role of evangelicals in US foreign policy), I was struck by the extreme vulnerability of many thousands of people to violence liable to explode at any moment at the least perceived ethnic or religious provocation, but actually grounded in cynical politics.  So many, in so many places, living their lives on the edges of their seats.  Homes, livelihoods, harvests––everything is precarious.

It’s very far away from here.

The world outside the screened porch.

*A little investigation suggests that "Iquitosman" is an expatriate American, married to a Peruvian, named Paul Opp, formerly a businessman from Washington State who founded an NGO called People of Peru Project (POPP), and lives in Iquitos.   He recommends a photo essay about Belén:

http://jakelyell.com/2007/07/16/water-borne-poverty-a-photo-essay-from-the-peruvian-amazon-basin/