Thursday, December 5, 2013

THE INVISIBLE FENCE

A bridge too far:  the boundary of the invisible fence


In early November we had a dog fence installed in a rough circle around the part of our property that we consider lawn, as opposed to meadow.  “Lawn” in this case doesn’t include the pond or the area across from the pond, the section that descends to the sugarhouse, or our road that leads out to the main road, Hallock Road.  This fence is, literally, invisible, and consists of an electrified looped wire trenched a few inches below ground.  The only visual signs it exists are the small white flag markers set at five or six foot intervals.  This is our dog fence. 


Skyler at five months, looking almost grownup

Brittanys Daisy and Skyler, are very scent-oriented.   As you would expect from a dog originally bred from English Setters and another hunting spaniel.  Given complete freedom to roam, Skyler and Daisy would likely race off into the field and into the woods (or, far scarier, the road).   All that would be needed would be the scent of an animal track or even more enticing, a skunk or turkey, say, poking around seductively in the field.  They both love the tall grass and would disappear into it in seconds.  Keep in mind that five month old dogs have pretty poor judgment.  It was either have an invisible fence or a visible fence, or have the dogs on a leash every time they’re outside. 

Lesley and I spent a few hours a day for about two weeks working with both Daisy and Skyler to train them so they would learn that this “fence” marks a boundary they must not cross under any circumstances.  (To test them, we provided some circumstances:  tossing treats beyond the boundary, one of us walking beyond it, and dragging a scented towel on a fishing line.  They passed.)  Each dog wears a special collar that picks up transmission from the underground wire.  When a dog gets within a few feet of the wire the collar transmits a high pitched beeping sound­–a sound that might be simply annoying to people, like an electronic device signaling low battery power, but unpleasant to a dog.  If they go a step closer to the wire, they will get a small electric shock.  When we started out Skyler became wary after a few beeping incidents and seemed really intimidated.  Daisy was bold, enough so that it took an actual shock to get her to turn back.  Then the roles reversed, and Daisy became fearful while Skyler confidently ran near–but not too near–the edge.  

Caught in a brief (hence slightly blurred) pause in play, Skyler at top, Daisy in the forefront.  

It’s several weeks later now, and both dogs have made adjustments. As it is, they have plenty of space to tear around without pushing their luck.  Each dog, though, at separate intervals, has been onto something interesting enough that she/he adopted a crouch position and crept slowly, slowly forward toward the boundary, hoping if they were stealthy enough it would let them through somehow.   No dice.  Each time they quickly ran back to safe territory.


Skyler and Daisy lapping up bird seed or, maybe, bird poop

We have adjusted, too, to having a bit more freedom.  The pups now need supervision at a distance.  We are no longer tied to the other end of the leash.

**

A gloomy afternoon in the snowless (so far) Banana Belt (our part of the Champlain Valley)

We are onto another kind of tether right now.  As a follow-up to Ken’s September operation, and as a precaution (with a T2 tumor, no matter how small or how completely it has been removed, there remains the possibility of an escaped cancer cell, the consequences of which could be very unpleasant), his doctor prescribed five weeks of low-level radiation and low-level chemo.  With only minor, if any, side effects, they said encouragingly. 

Every weekday, Monday through Friday, Ken and I (I’m expected to accompany him) make the drive to Fletcher-Allen in Burlington for Ken’s treatment.  Mid-week, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, the visits are short, only about 20 minutes to half an hour in all, compared with the drive which takes about 45 minutes.  Radiation is quick, the waiting room is comfortable and serene, with decent magazines and jigsaw puzzles. The receptionists remember you.  Mondays and Fridays the visits are longer.   On the longer visits we visit chemotherapy in addition to radiation. Ken gets a pump on Monday that he wears through the week until it is removed on Friday.   (Daisy, whom we are dog-sitting from 11-4 while Lesley works, and Skyler spend those days in doggie daycare where they frolic themselves to exhaustion from what we hear.) 

The chemo waiting room is different.  It’s always crowded and there is barely enough seating.  The room is too small.  There is often a line of people waiting to check in.  The few magazines are dog-eared and out of date.  Hardly anyone bothers looking at them.  More than the radiation waiting room, it is a door into sickness.  When I sit there waiting with Ken I feel a stab of pain if I see young children come in.  Babies, even.  What are they doing here?  Is it possible that they have cancer?  Or does a parent?  Some enter in wheelchairs, others wearily, or matter-of-factly, like they’ve been here many times before.  Some wear bandanas instead of hair.  Others look too young to be here.  It should be for the old.  We have crossed a boundary into a world that feels set apart.  Not real.  Not part of life outside.  It’s a feeling I often get in hospitals.   But there’s nothing unreal about what goes on in these waiting rooms, in these hospitals.  One might say that what happens there is more grounded in our all too real humanity than the thin veneer of our own “real” daily lives.  Yet every time we leave the hospital, especially on Fridays, we feel free again.  Happy to return to the busyness, the lassitude, the joy, the tedium, the tumult of our daily lives.

Friday, November 15, 2013

IN ANOTHER STATE (CO)






Arctic appearance, somewhere between the "outdoor sports" (read: hunting) town of Kremling and Steamboat Springs.



Fog and snow en route from Denver.
Steamboat is some three hours northwest of the city.


The snow delineates rock layers that cut through ridges and buttes in western Colorado in late fall. More like signs of a Vermont early winter than Halloween time at the end of October which is what it actually is. 

Outside Steamboat Springs is ranch country, the kind of ranch country where modest houses sit in vast open areas surrounded by miscellaneous collections of sheds and outbuildings, stacked hay bales, and plains where cattle roam––real ranches, in other words.  As distinguished from those nearer to this ski town with their huge uniformly western-themed homes, some of which may sport a matching barn, and, very likely, no cattle at all.  Local real estate publications show very large homes (8,000-plus square feet is not unusual) and uncountable condos with soaring spaces built from veritable forests of wood beams, interiors with gorgeous stone fireplaces, chandeliers of elk antlers, filled with cushiony rustic furniture  and sprinkled with Indian artifacts––all looking as if they had been ordered from the same Western motif marketplace. 

Not a hotel,  just another large ranch home

Condos and more condos on Mt. Werner, a few of the large homes can be seen marching up the hill behind.






Ski areas don't look their best without snow.  Just one day later everything turned white,
however, and it was cold enough for snowmaking. (12 degrees!)



Colorado is in an interesting state at this moment in time.  Long heavily conservative, like most western states, Colorado took a turn in the liberal direction recently. For example, marijuana has become legal for medicinal use, and cannabis stores sell it baked in food, candy, smokable–however.  Guaranteed potency, of course, for a standardized market product, a useful fact to keep in mind.


Cannabis in brownies ("Get Happy"), lollipops and a package of gum drops.


Looking almost like gum drops, aspen leaves dot the snow.


Even gun control made headway with current Democratic Colorado Governor Hickenlooper's advocacy.   Outsiders may not see this as an amazing feat, given Colorado's recent history of mass gun violence (notably Columbine High school in 1999 and the Aurora theater shootings in 2012), but most of us know better:  guns have an iconic stature in this country, and logic, morality and scientific data are mostly irrelevant, liberal governor or no.  Both these issues, especially gun control, have––no surprise––brought on a backlash in the more conservative counties like those around Fort Collins in the northeast corner of the state.  They are aiming to secede from the rest of the state.  This will, most certainly, go nowhere.   The ski towns that mostly hug the mountainous central section (Steamboat among the exceptions), plus cities like Denver and Boulder, comprise the other, more liberal Colorado, to a large extent.  Although it must be said that while we were there a major referendum on comprehensive funding and reforming K-12 education in the state was widely rejected.  (Tax increase!) Gay marriage still divides the state.  So the backlash continues.


Rock in the Rockies:  "very hard quartz, probably associated with banded gneiss,"
according to geologist Bill, on our Mount Zerkel area hike.


Visits to Steamboat on our part used to be annual for a while, winter visits to ski and visit Luke and family at the same time.  This, of course, was an off-season visit.  There's already snow, but not enough to ski on except at altitudes over 7,000 feet (downtown Steamboat is about 6,900, while Rabbit Ears pass above town is around 9,400), although judging from the snowfall while we were there, it won’t be long.  But skiing in Steamboat isn't on our agenda this year.


On the way to Fish Creek Falls, a few miles outside Steamboat


Stream near Fish Creek Falls


That there is cancer on both sides of the Rockies, father and son, is surely ironic.  Different varieties, different intensities, but they are both called cancer.  Luke’s dad Ken had a colonoscopy in September that led to removal of a small tumor, that led to an infection, that led to weeks of discomfort and misery, the hellish time described last month in "Dog Days of Fall."  To make certain no cancer cells escaped removal and to totally prevent recurrence, procedures similar to those Luke had, and is having, are proscribed.  (No "stage" name for his cancer, however, the thing described as kind of a “gray area,” meaning that had they been able to grab twelve negative lymph nodes when they only managed to grab six he would already be in the clear.)  Therefore, like Luke, to some extent, he will have radiation and chemotherapy, the chemo in this case described as only adjunct to radiation and supposedly with few, if any notable side effects.   Not a big deal, apparently.  But still.

Petra, Kelsey, and Luke post-chemo, pre-radiation, looking good, on the
Mount Zerkel Wilderness Area Trail.

A horseback group is almost hidden by aspens in the Mount Zerkel area.


The ski jumps are visible behind the lodge as we headed up Howelsen Hill right behind the main street.
Petra, Kelsey, Luke, Ken, Bill, walking up the Howelsen Hill trail


Ever since spring Luke has written candidly and unsparingly on Facebook about his battle against Stage 4 Hodgkins-type lymphoma through months of intense chemotherapy. Ahead are weeks of radiation at a spa-like facility in Vail (sounds nice on the face of it, Vail), and after that, we hope, a life free of cancer. (Hodgkins, even at late stages, has 85% survivability after five years, as the statistics lay it out.)  
  

On a hike up Howelsen Hill, we look over the town of Steamboat (Luke, Kelsey, brother Bill)






***

While we were away from Vermont the trees have shaken off what was left of their leaves, their branches now ready to bear snow.  Only a week, yet the change seemed large. So far the only snow that has arrived is in the guise of heavy frost.  When it’s there in the early morning it delineates the edges of things, like rocks and tufts of grass, as the snow did in Colorado.  Hidden scenes are visible again.  The rock ledge at the edge of the woods is freshly unveiled, the curtains have been pulled back on houses once lost behind trees, and the distant mountains seem taller and more majestic now their tops are dusted white.  So much lost with the change of season, but things gained as well.  


Snow storm as we head over Rabbit Ears Pass on the way back to Denver.


There is nothing like this in the Champlain Valley at all, but we hear the mountains, particulary north at Stowe, have some two feet of snow and will be opening their slopes before Thanksgiving.  Welcome winter!



Monday, October 7, 2013

THE DOG DAYS OF FALL

Breadloaf campus, on Middlebury Gap, Route 125



To get right down to it, ever since “It’s Over” (previous entry), things have been pretty crazy around here.  At the same time it has been probably the most beautiful time of year.   (Did I say that about June?).   Colors especially intense, days of sun blindingly bright and sparkling light––too much to take in at one time.

Let me explain. 

Skyler, at about 12 weeks

Our new puppy came from a shelter.  Unusual, as he’s a pure bred Brittany.  There was an elderly couple in the Stowe area that bred Brittanys and had decided to quit the breeding business.  Somehow or other there was an accidental mating.  Skyler, and four siblings, three females, two males, were the result.  The couple gave the entire litter to the North Country Animal League. The Huston family first saw the puppies at a dog-centered event at the Shelburne Museum and were smitten.  They decided they wanted a puppy.  A few days later I drove up to the Stowe animal shelter with Lesley to pick up Daisy.  I was fatefully smitten, too.  Adoption forms were handy and so I filled one out, just in case.  When I told Ken about the puppies he was ready to get one at that very moment.  The decision was made.  A week later we picked up the pup that we named Skyler.

Skyler has kept us busy.  A puppy, if you've ever had one, is like a human toddler in ability and knowledge.  And charm.

A committed lap sleeper.  

But first, the week from hell.   

All this happened at once:  Ken had a test that revealed a tumor, we adopted a puppy, surgery took place (in Burlington, some 40 minutes away), Ken developed an infection, there was a trip to our local ER (Middlebury), the puppy got sick, an emergency trip to the vet (Vergennes), Ken's infection got worse, another trip to our major ER (Burlington) where surgery had taken place, the puppy got sicker, threw up all night long (I was laundering towels at 3 in the morning), a trip to an emergency ($$$) veterinary service (Burlington, again), Ken in the hospital (the people hospital, Burlington again), me with no sleep.  Things began to improve when both Ken and puppy were home from their various hospitals.  (Puppy improved more rapidly, both physically and mentally.)  The good news: Ken's surgery successful, infection a thing of the past, and our puppy is wild and happy and sweet, just like a puppy should be.   


Skyler is keeping us on our toes.  (Or did I say that already?)

Skyler (right) and sister Daisy, in a rare moment of quiet

Tussling with his slightly larger sister at the Hustons next door is one easy way to use up some of his energy (Daisy's too), as long as one can stand the play growling and general tearing around.  But then Brittanys like activity, and having Skyler will keep encouraging us in the same direction.  The scoop on Brittanys is as follows:

“The breed was originally bred as a hunting dog and noted for being easy to train and sweet-natured. The breed is generally more sensitive to correction than other hunting breeds, and harsh corrections are often unnecessary.  Brittanys are all around sound dogs, as they are excellent family pets as well as working dogs in the field. Brittanys are eager to please, friendly, and sometimes sensitive dogs. They generally learn quickly and are loyal and attached to their owners. They are great with kids. Brittanys are energetic dogs, and need at least an hour of vigorous exercise every day. The dogs are active and require frequent exercise and room to run, and a fenced yard is essential. At least one long walk is required daily to satisfy the needs of most Brittanys, and many Brittanys will need more than this. The Brittany makes an ideal companion for an active owner.”



We have been doing a fair amount of walking, all things considered.  One nearby pleasant walking site is the Dead Creek area.  It reminds me a lot of Concord, Massachusetts' Great Meadows, next to the Concord River.  Only much bigger.


One of several ponds in the Dead Creek WIldlife Management Area

At nearby Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area, primarily a waterfowl refuge, the annual Dead Creek Day had retrieval demonstrations, among other activities relating to wildlife.   Dead Creek is a lazy collection of waters, including partially manmade impoundments, all draining into Otter Creek and ultimately Lake Champlain. With Skyler accompanying us, we could barely walk ten yards without our puppy being swarmed by admirers.  (How can anyone not stop to pet a puppy!)  Skyler watched the demonstrations of water and field retrievals and search and rescue dog performances intently, without, I suspect, learning a thing.  He also met, less happily, a pair of bear hounds.  (Yes, trained to run down and, I imagine, tree, bears.  Not something I would especially care to see.)  



All eyes are on the retriever currently in the field

Plying the Robert Frost interpretive trail on Middlebury Gap and a trek down the old Vergennes Waterworks (known to those from Bristol as the Bristol Waterworks) trail with Andy and Davey McGavern (Davey handling Daisy for this vigorous puppy workout) were more leisurely, for the adults, anyway.  The days were clear and the trees bright with reds and oranges.  


A forest trail

At the near horizon the trees on the hill have gone completely orange
(Robert Frost Interpretative Trail)


Scattered along the Robert Frost trail are some of his poems, sometimes fitting the site, other times not.  


IN HARDWOOD GROVES

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above,
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade
They must go down past things coming up
They must go down into the dark decayed.

They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know this is the way in ours.





And maybe here a birch could prompt amusing thoughts like this:



A YOUNG BIRCH

The birch begins to crack its outer sheath
Of baby green and show the white beneath,
As whosoever likes the young and slight
May well have noticed.  Soon entirely white
To double day and cut in half the dark
It will stand forth, entirely white in bark,
And nothing but the top a leafy green –
The only native tree that dares to lean,
Relying on its beauty to the air.
(Less brave perhaps than trusting are the fair.)
And someone reminiscent will recall
How once in cutting brush along the wall
He spared it from the number of the slain,
At first to be no bigger than a cane,
And then no bigger than a fishing pole,
But now at last so obvious a bole
The most efficient help you ever hired
Would know that it was there to be admired,
And zeal would not be thanked that cut it down
When you were reading books or out of town.
It was a thing of beauty and was sent
To live its life out as an ornament.



There are numerous other poems scattered here and there, but this one seems to fit the season best:




NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down today.
Nothing gold can stay.




One so young, the other so old.  Harry has well over 15 years, and Skyler only two months plus.  Harry is visibly slowing down fmonth to month, breathing heavily after a bit of exercise, and, lately, snoring at night.  He is not particularly impressed by Skyler.  Rufus came and went.  As for Harry's time, we shall see.  Nothing gold can stay.