IS THIS TOO GRIM? Into a New Decade

Collapse. Is this too grim a metaphor?

It only just occured to me that the end of this year marks the end of a decade.  Usually it seems one works up to that realization, beginning with nostalgic looks back to the first few years, followed by some thoughts about how far we've come, best moments, blah, blah.  But "usually" applies to nothing anymore. The world is different.

Like too many people (okay, Republicans) who are too afraid the president will shoot them (metaphorically) to admit having any modicum of integrity, I too want to hide. Sometimes, at least. It's all too horrible and cuts too deep. I can't bear listen to every argument and discussion, or take in heavy doses of political rhetoric. I cannot listen to the live words of our White House narcissist-in-chief. For a long time now I've also not unable to watch nature films, beautiful nature films, because toward the end there is always the inevitable "...now, however..." statement about the future, or the lack of one. Nevertheless I'm a news wonk. I like knowing all the details about whatever's happening. It's just that I can't watch it unfurl in real time. No live debates for me, I'll read the summaries the next day, thank you.

What I have patience for though is the reasoned analysis, the thoughtful insight, the story behind the story, the personal story, what makes something or someone tick. So I check the NYTimes, the Huff Post, CNN, CBS, BBC and whatever else turns up. So besides fiction I read Masha Gessen's "The Future is History" (Putin's Russia), and "Midnight in Chernobyl," (more Russia), "Red Notice" (still more Russia) and "Home Now," (immigrants in Maine) and "Amity and Prosperity" (corporate pollution), plus anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the global environment. And so on and on. It's like streaming versus network TV.

It was a more innocent time in 2010 when we decided to move to Vermont, but only in retrospect. There was nothing particularly innocent about 2010, but in comparison with the present it looks very much so. We had no awareness then of the schism that everyone feels, and that cuts right across this country.  We weren't accustomed to public denials of reality in those long ago days. We didn't read daily about conspiracies and hate groups. We couldn't imagine progress on pollution could be reversed. We never imagined truth could lose its power. We never thought so many countries would revert to old, ugly ways. To think such things would have been impossibly cynical.  Now we realize that an era has passed, not simply another ten years. An era packed into such a short time. The very notion of time seems strangely stretched and snapped back like a rubber band: each day is full of a week's worth of events, every month contains a year.  It's exhausting.


Even the words that we are speaking now
thieving time
has stolen away,
and nothing can return. 1



But why talk about what we already know.



I can measure ten years in one way:

March 2011

Now

See how the tree has grown from one whose trunk you could shake to a tree offering shade.  Besides tree growth there is absence. See in the distance the small white dog (our Harry) and the larger dog (the Huston's Sadie)?  Gone now.  See the small children? Nearly adults.

Things do change in ten years. 

He knew the damselfly was on his forehead. Ken had no quarrel with insects.

Words fail.

Back to now!

(Photo/painting by Jim Westphalen, Edgewater Gallery, Middlebury) 

@

Better to talk about things that happen here. It's winter, and once again easy to find coyote, fox, and deer tracks. Of which there are many. Since I mentioned politics earlier I should mention that I try to actively support Protect Our Wildlife, an organization that managed to get a bill passed outlawing coyote killing contests in this state. (About time, you might think.) Along with our global environment under threat, wildlife is having it harder with every passing year. To a degree, even in Vermont. Fragmentation of habitat is probably the biggest challenge. But archaic hunting and trapping regulations, supported by a retrograde Fish and Wildlife Commission, aren't helping.

Here's a story:
On October 19th a pack of bear hunting hounds attacked two hikers and their puppy on forest trail in nearby Ripton. The couple, who had been hiking in the area for many years, were swarmed by five 60-70 pound hounds wearing GPS collars. The pup was attacked first, and when they tried to protect the dog, they too were attacked, knocked down and bloodied. The attack went on and on, until finally a member of the hunting party running the hounds showed up. Instead of the cowed bear the hunters had expected to see, they found the injured couple and their dog. (All survived.) Collared hounds are generally far ahead of their followers, heedless of whose property they are passing through, and, obviously, can't be guaranteed to circle in on only a bear. Protect Our Wildlife is currently lobbying for a regulation to shorten what is currently a ridiculously long bear hound training period (allowing hounds to chase bears for practice without any treed and doubtless terrorized bears geting killed) that now runs from June into September, followed by bear hunting season. This is only a first and very modest step.

Here's a story:
Even though I support stopping the killing of coyotes any old time and by any means, having a close encounter with one is still unnerving. My dog Skyler doesn't venture beyond the line he perceives as the limit of the invisible (mild shock-inducing) fence. This is fortunate, for in the dark he guards the perimeter.  One recent evening about ten o'clock after I let him out for his final outside time he began barking and running madly back and forth in circles around the house. (Not for the first time.) I called him again and again, but what his nose was telling him shut out anything his ears may have heard. He knew something was out there. I was in pajamas and bathrobe, but I put on boots, grabbed his leash and a flashlight and went outside to try and grab hold of him.  (Also not for the first time.) First I scanned the field behind the house with my flashlight to see if he was barking at an animal I could see. The beam caught a coyote in mid-field, looking right back at me. In the spotlight it began to walk closer. Then it walked even closer, slowly, in no rush. It kept coming closer. It was nearing the lawn. I ran back into the house and returned to the same spot with the leash, the flashlight, and now armed with a long walking stick. The coyote came within fifteen or maybe just ten feet short of the lawn and the invisible border behind which was a crazed Skyler. The coyote stood still, directly facing this mad, hysterical creature. I clapped my hands. Nothing moved. I slapped the flashlight. Anything to make a noise. Still nothing. The coyote kept standing there, looking at this wild agitated thing that was Skyler. Trying not to think what might happen next, I ran toward the coyote and shouted "Shoo, shoo!" Thankfully, he turned at last and–very, very, slowly, reluctantly–began walking further back into the field. But he was in no hurry. He stopped and looked back at us. (He was beautiful, big, like a wolf.) Then he vanished into the dark. I thought, maybe he figured he decided he didn't have time for this kind of nonsense.

Collapse. But it no longer looks so grim.

Local news. I can deal with that. It tends to bring you back to where you are.

I feel better about 2020 already. The events here are the ones that seem to matter most.

Perhaps God has many more seasons

in store for us––

or perhaps the last is to be 

this winter

that guides back the waves

of the Tyrrhenian Sea

to break against 

the rough pumice cliffs.

You must be wise. Pour the wine

and enclose in this brief circle

your long-cherished hope. 2

1 Horace, Odes, quoted in "The Order of Time," Carlo Rovelli
2 Ibid.

FALL RITUALS

I'm not short of apples.  Even the two apple trees that have been reluctant to produce up to now, two of the four trees, have decided to offer samples of what they could  do.  Only a sample though.  Four or five apples on one, a single one or two on the other.  I've no idea what took them so long.  Nor can I imagine what they might do if they really got going.

Skyler is fond of apples, proudly bringing a couple of them inside every day. When he's especially excited about an apple catch he will bring it to me––I'm never sure what he's expecting me to do with it––then after I look at his effort with appreciation––yay, wonderful!–– he will run around the house with it and deposit it somewhere.  Maybe in his bed, maybe on the floor, maybe on another bed.  Sometimes he will eat the whole thing.

Skyler's find, on one of the guest beds.

He is also really fond of pears.  My pear tree is way overgrown, possibly the biggest pear tree I've ever seen, years past its prime.  I've found that when I pick those pears at what should be the right time they don't ripen any further, they stay hard and all at once go completely soft and rot.  There is no in between.  Skyler eats them, too, seeds, stem and all.  So far, fingers crossed, he hasn't thrown up.

Unfortunately, all my apples are misshapen.  That translates into a peeling chore for pies, applesauce or whatever I might make.  They do taste good, though, despite the bother.  What they'd be best for, I suppose, is cider.  My family next door made plenty of that last week.  All their materials for cider making are improvised, with the exception of the old cider press.  First the apples are rinsed and cut in half, and then, with the help of an old wiffle ball bat, shoved into a garbage disposal and dumped as apple mush into the bucket below.  The mush in turn is dumped into the cider press which has been lined with an old sheet that serves as a filter and holds the mush together.  The cider is strained as it's being poured into old milk jugs, some to drink fresh, most of it to be frozen.

Grandson Hans' hand steadies the press while Chris turn the press wheel.

An iconic seasonal act and a chore for everyone who lives near trees is, of course, leaf raking.  I never have to rake leaves.  This may seem nothing short of amazing, given that there is forest all around and a couple of trees near the house.  The reason is wind, wind coming from just the right direction and that direction is primarily northeasterly.  So it neatly blows the leaves into the woods. I have no complaints.

I've been assessing the flora recently, the kind of stock-taking you do in the fall when the need for weeding slows down and you see the shape of things more clearly.  Here's an example.  All summer long I've been fighting this enormous hedge-like shrub that was lined up under the kitchen area windows.  To keep it in shape through the growing season meant getting a ladder into the damned thing on a regular basis, only to find it sending up shoots again with great enthusiasm only days later.  Okay, I decided one day last month, I'm done with you. I'm not doing this anymore. You're over.  So I cut it down and dug it out.

This is the one: an overgrown forsythia that long ago gave up blossoming in order to concentrate on growing taller. Dianthus fills areas around it.

(Parenthetically...

...uh-oh, comparing the 2019 photo above and this 2010 one, pre-porch, made me
notice that the house needs to be re-stained. Badly.)

As I was saying, I replaced the overgrown forsythia "hedge" with three dwarf winterberries and one hydrangea. Winterberries need a male plant nearby if there are to produce those red berries. The male plant is diminutive and looks like a different plant entirely.  None of them should be able to reach window level height, ever.

The berry-less male plant is hiding behind. Wire tomato cages around the bases are to keep Skyler, drawn by the odor of bone meal, from digging.  They should look better by next year. 

Besides the plantings, there's one major new thing:  a woodshed.  Last winter I was fed up with digging out wood from under a snow and ice-covered tarp, stepping on pallets that sometimes broke under my feet, and generally stumbling around to gather a pile of logs.  The piled up kindling was even harder to grab, not to mention first locating it under a foot of snow.

The shed (Chris Huston's design) easily holds four cords of wood, leaving the space nearest the house free for storing the recycle containers, kindling and other odds and ends. Stacking was easy, compared with making a free-standing pile.

There's still a short walk from the woodshed to the back porch where a day or two's worth of wood is stacked,
 but that shouldn't be much of a challenge.

After I removed plants and old woodpile pallets and did the usual shrub trimming I ended up with a good-sized burn pile.  That's what we call yard waste that's bigger than leaves plus miscellaneous wood.  Next I'll pick a day with a forecast of little to no wind and get a burn permit from the town and fire it up.  This promises to be a big one.  Maybe some cold damp day in November?  Or maybe it'll be a bonfire event.

The current burn pile, on the site of last year's.  The longer it sits there the bigger it gets.

When I looked at the 2010 photo of the house, the one that told me it was tie for repainting, I was impressed by how different the house looked, nevermind the structural additions.  Aging color.  I was also impressed by the changes to the landscape.  Aging flora.  It's not only the house that looks different now, but almost ten years of growth have made their mark.  It kind of snuck up on me.  Aging me.

This old photo looks like it could have been taken at the edge of a golf course:

The pond, looking toward Snake Mountain. Photo taken in fall 2010.  

By the end of our first winter in 2011 when we were building our new porch a few shrubs had to be moved, so we relocated them on the other side of the pond and added a river birch next to them.  We decided to let the pond edge be natural, letting it go wild.  It gives better cover to pond creatures and there's no need for edge trimming.  A few years ago during a lull in sugaring sons-in-law Cliff and Chris built a bridge over the place where meadow seepage fills the pond, a sometime brook. You can hardly see the bridge when the grasses are this high.

The same view, September 2019.  Big difference, huh?

There are plenty of other signs here and there of time passing as measured by plantings.  Trees seem to have grown almost surreptitiously.  I was surprised when I saw a photo of what this maple looked like when we arrived, compared with how it looks today.  

Spindly adolescent, that tree. Atop the hay bale in the background are grandchildren, along with our dog Harry and two Huston dogs.  Photo taken in spring 2011. 

Same tree.  The shade gives a sense of its size.

The first frost arrived this morning, layering the field and everything in the house's early morning shadow with a touch of sparkly white.  The basil, still at its peak this late in the season, is probably finished now.  I hadn't bothered to cover it last night because so often the frost forecast is for everywhere else except the Champlain Valley.  Soon it will be time once again to take off the screens, put away the sun umbrellas, take down the porch blinds, cover up the porch cushions, set mousetraps in the basement, do the final mowing, and trim the plants around the pond before it ices over––at least a month away––and wait for winter.

So it goes. 

RE: TROUBLE ON THE PLANET

[Detail: "Eighth in a Suite of Untoward Occurrences on Monhegan Is., Jamie Wyeth, Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME]

I felt a need to get immersed in art.  Given that the natural world seems to be on a short trip to hell.  (The hot place.)

It's already been reported that the Great Barrier Reef is in serious trouble. Now we hear that there are three billion (billion!) fewer birds than there were as recently as 1970.  Insects have declined.  Forests are burning, glaciers melting.  Current trends strongly suggest there will be more plastic in the ocean (by weight) than fish by 2050.  There is increased poaching in Africa.  Habitat is being lost everywhere.  Extinction looms for many species.  Right now, here, in this country–and, sadly, not only here––we have a president whose response to this is scorn.  He doesn't give a damn.

Help!

[Untitled, Carly Huston]

[Jamie Wyeth, Farnsworth Gallery, Rockland, ME]

But lets not go there!


I'll turn instead to stones. Stones are immutable, unlike biologic things.  They wear away in geologic time, not human time.  I love to run my hands over smooth stones.  Circles suggest contemplation, unity.


(Re art by the way:  What you see in art is what you bring to it, emotionally, intellectually.  You have to bear that in mind.)

[Alan Magee, Dowlling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

[Alan Magee, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

(These sea-smoothed stones are paintings, by the way, not photographs.  Huge paintings, in fact.  Yet even when my face was inches away, the stones were still stones, not painted objects.  I'll let them speak for themselves.)

(Aaah.)



But there it is again, the thing that looms underneath the surface, that exists whether we know it or not, and that doesn't go away.

[Jamie Wyeth, Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME]

[Alan Magee, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

 (Gloom.  Gloom.)



Can we do something?  Should we?  What, exactly?

["Once in Every Man and Nation," Bo Bardett, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

(I' can't say what the artist intended with this picture, but as I said before, you see in art what you bring to it.)

["Transitional Space,"  Alexandra Tyng, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

Hah!  I remember the lines in Genesis that Ken so disliked: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”  He hated "dominion."  What arrogance humans are granted! 

[Untitled, Carly Huston]

Who are we, anyway, to have dominion over everything?  Look what we have done with that power.

[Alexandra Tyng, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

(I am at sea.  Disturbing the water.)

VARMINTS!

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Doesn’t “varmints” sound like a word from the past? Along with skedaddle, doggone, whippersnapper and the like?  

Here’s William Safire, NYTIMES, back in 2007, on “varmint:”

'I'm not a big-game hunter," said Mitt Romney, campaigning in Indianapolis. "I've made that very clear. I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will."

There's a gem of dialect out of the Wild West. In hundreds of cowboy movies, the man in the white hat scowls at the rustlers and the gunfighters and excoriates them with varmint, the meanest, dirtiest, most lowdown word permitted by the prim self-censorship office then run by Will Hays.

And there was that scene in "Duel in the Sun," a 1946 David Selznick epic widely known as "Lust in the Dust," which was directed by King Vidor and was at the time the most expensive movie ever made. Lewt, the ne'er-do-well son played by Gregory Peck, leers at Pearl Chavez, the beautiful half-Indian, half-Anglo who is trying to be virtuous, and says, "I'll try to get you one of them newfangled bathing suits" - to which Pearl, played by Jennifer Jones, furious at his lascivious put-down, hisses the most severe derogation then permissible: "You - you varmint!"

The word had appeared in P. T. Barnum's 1854 autobiography as an imprecation - "ye young varmint!" - as well as in a 1907 A. Conan Doyle story as an adjective: "thin, ascetic, varminty." It is a dialect form of vermin, rooted in the Latin for "worm," and encompasses animals of cunning (foxes, raccoons, snakes) as well as animals that cause revulsion, like moles, gophers, mice, rats and skunks.

The word's usage is bipartisan: In 2004, President George W. Bush told Outdoor Life magazine that one of the guns he kept in his collection was a gift from "Bob Bullock, my old buddy" on his deathbed, a .243-caliber "varmint rifle."

You could challenge his “animals of cunning” phrase (rats? mice? cunning? Really?) As for revulsion, that seems heavy.  Mostly, we misunderstand, or just don’t have the knowledge to understand what animals do to survive.  We’re so…duh.

Google “varmints” and you get coyotes.  Topping this helpful list you will find the website  https://www.wideopenspaces.com on which you can read the following:

Arguably the best varmint to go after, considering the devastating impact they can have on your local deer property, coyote hunts are also among the best ways for hunters to stay active and sharp during the winter months. Coyotes are treacherous predators, and if you let them, they will take deer on your favorite property out of the game before you can get to them.

Since they often target does or younger bucks, coyotes can have an adverse effect on the reproductive trends of a deer population. If you shoot a buck and it runs off into the woods to die elsewhere, coyotes can also be the pests that make a meal out of the male deer before you get a chance to collect him.

In other words, you have plenty of reasons to want coyotes off your property. Why not use them for target practice?”

Live animals. Target practice.  This is wrong, misinformed, not to mention repugnant, in so many ways.

HUNTING VARMINTS IN VERMONT

Vermont may seem enlightened in many ways, perhaps for its reasonable politics (most of the time), its life style (liberal, non-nonsense New England-ish, primarily), its environment (hey, no billboards!), and history (on the positive side, more often than not).  Overall, the state looks pretty good.  Vermont is also known for its hunting, and has its share of “varmint” hunting and the people who love it.  Our Fish and Wildlife Commission is noted for being pro-hunting in the sense that it opposes just about anything that might limit hunting. It appears to be comfortable in the varmint camp.  

It was only a year ago that coyote killing contests–rewards offered for the killer of the most coyotes of any size or age in a single day–were outlawed. The resulting carcasses were tossed in ditches or otherwise discarded.  Fish and Wildlife wasn’t supportive of the bill to ban these grisley contests, and the Governor (Rep.) was passively opposed, allowing it to become law without his signature.  Of course, even without a formal contest in a state where coyotes can be killed day or night, by any means, every single day of the year, there’s nothing to prevent a bunch of shooters vying with one another to see who can kill the most coyotes in some fixed time. Nevertheless, getting this passed was a significant, though limited, victory for Protect Our Wildlife, and it demonstrated their clout.

As you might expect, Vermont hunting licensing for deer and other large mammals is set yearly based upon the size and health of the deer or other animal population.  These estimates are in turn supposedly based upon scientific data.  You might imagine, then, that on Vermont Fish and Wildlife’s website facts about coyotes would be accurate.  Alas, they are not. For one thing, their estimate of the number of coyotes in the state makes no sense.  The numbers are stated to be anywhere from “one per seven or eight square miles to one-plus per square mile.”  If we assume the number of one per seven square miles and use the number two as a conservative average per one square mile, given Vermont’s area of 9,614 square miles, you end up with Vermont having either 1,300 coyotes or nearly 20,000. It would be impossible to base hunting regulations on numbers as slippery as those.  Anyone might guess the number of mice in Vermont with equally wild results. 

According to wolf and coyote expert Chris Schadler,¹ the number of coyotes in Vermont is probably around 5,000 to 7,000, more than are found in her native New Hampshire where mange has been limiting their numbers.

Then there is the predation-on-deer-herd argument. Vermont’s Fish and Wildlife Commission (or should we call it the Fish and Wildlife Omission?) seemingly has little interest in doing any real thinking about coyotes and deer predation.  Coyotes, unlike wolves who will hunt in packs to bring down large game, have highly varied diets and often hunt alone.  They will eat small mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish, insects, fruit and vegetables, but rabbits and rodents are their top choice. Since white-footed mice are major carriers of ticks carrying Lyme disease we should happy to have them on any predator’s menu. Scientists who study these animals agree “There is no credible evidence that indiscriminate killing of coyotes succeeds in increasing the abundance of game species such as deer or pheasants.”²  In other words, coyotes do not deplete the deer herd.

Opportunistic means that when food presents itself, a coyote will take advantage.  (Taking advantage suggests being wily, being sly, hence the coyote is the symbolic trickster of western Indian lore, and the one Looney Tunes’ dubbed Wile E. Coyote.)  Presented with both hunger and opportunity, coyotes will take a fawn, even though that isn’t their primary food source.  Yet tractors are the most common killlers of fawns, because fawns lie quietly to hide from predators in tall grass–where I memorably came upon fawns, twice––and mowing starts in early summer when there are many fawns.  It's an unpleasant thought. But the biggest predator of deer is hunters. And hunting regulations determine and control to a large extent the size of the state’s deer herd.

COYOTE LIFE

In the wild coyotes don’t have long life spans. They may live for a scant four to five years. A half to three-quarters of their offspring are unlikely to survive their first year.  In New Hampshire there may be about 5,000 coyotes, and Vermont may have 5,000 to 7,000, Maine, given its size, may have as many as 10,000 to 12,000. 

Survival of a pack is ensured by certain breeding behaviors.  In a stable pack, only the father and mother will breed, and the mother will prevent daughters from breeding.  In fact she might kill a daughter’s pups. This behavior serves to prevent expansion of the pack beyond what might be supported by habitat.  Two-thirds of females don’t breed anyway.  They have only a week of fertility.  Mating occurs from January to March. Pups are born in April, and will move out of the den after eight weeks of nursing. 

Coyotes are not endangered. All the years of killing have produced–more coyotes!  How does this make sense?  The answer lies in their social structure.  When their pack is disrupted it stimulates increased reproduction.  If the dominant breeding pair is killed, the pack breaks up and its members disperse. They will all look for mates, and reproduce.  The more coyotes are killed, the more habitant for nutrition is available to those that remain, and those that remain will produce more pups.  When a coyote is killed, it is one less mouth to feed, and that much more for the others.  More pups will result.  If an entire pack is eliminated, a neighboring pack, sensing opportunity, will move in.  More territory, again, more habitat and more pups.  This is a simple fact of coyote life that hunters seem unwilling or unable to understand.  How else, then, do they account for the fact that years of indiscriminate killing and attempts at complete extermination have only increased their numbers and spread?   

Coyote hunters are so…duh.

STOP BEING STUPID!

“There is something perverse about a government and a society which would mark a species for death, setting it outside the bounds of even our wildlife protection laws.”  (Dan Flores, Coyote America)

Can simple logic be invoked to establish a season for coyote hunting, as there are seasons for other mammals?  This would be an argument for consistency, based on realistic data.  Or are those who regulate hunting impervious to logic?  Sure, logic wouldn’t work for the fringe hunters who are truly sadistic and would like to shoot coyotes as target practice.  I’m assuming this is fringe behavior, not mainstream.  But could it work with members of the Fish and Wildlife Commission whose mission statement is, after all, “the conservation of all species of fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitat for the people of Vermont.” (Note the word “all.”)

Is there a way to be rid of killing 24/7/365 in a positive way?  Does ethical hunting behavior matter to the public?  Or is there a fear that placing any limit on indiscriminate hunting is analogous to gun control legislation where any legislation is seen as a step to “taking away our guns," the old "slippery slope' argument?  Can that be countered?

Isn't the attitude “if there isn’t a problem, why fix it?” a misunderstanding?  Isn’t the stable pack a superior alternative to the dispersed animals and their increased reproduction that occurs with disturbed packs? Isn't that an issue with ramifications?  

Varmints!   A verbal step away from vermin. What makes a varmint anyway?  Why are animals like foxes, coyotes, skunks, etc., considered varmints in the first place?  Is it because they are a nuisance, or somehow useless?  Is it because we, as humans, just don’t like them?  Do they annoy us?  Do they threaten us?  Are we so helpless we can't fend them off without killing them?  Oh, poor us!  Poor arrogant us!  We wield so much power over wildlife on this planet that we have already exterminated much of it, either purposefully or through negligence or through complete idiocy.  

We need to rethink this. 

  

¹Chris Schadler, lecture, 7/11/19, Ilsley Library, Middlebury,VT

 ²  A.M. Kitchen, E, M. Gese ad E. R. Schauster, Resource Partitioning between Coyotes and Swift Foxes: Space, Time, and Diet, Canadian Journal of Zoology-Revue Canadienne de Zoologie77, no 10o (1999) via Chris Schadler

---

 [NN1]

VERMONT UPDATE, for Ken, if you were here

It's been a while.  Since you've been gone I've been in Arkansas, California, Iceland, the Balkans (almost all of them), Maine, and Boston.  Lots of times, in the case of the last two places.  But best of all is being right here.  I can't imagine ever leaving.  It's not just home, but a place to watch the changing light of a day, the only place I've lived where I could be so aware of the seasons.  Right now it's the best time of all, June, when everything is fresh and in bloom and the air smells sweet.

Many things are happening just as they did before.  It's that circle of life cliché.

Swallows returned again and made their nests in the exact same places on the front porch as they did last year.  They had to make fresh nests this time because I removed them when I cleaned up their poop at the end of last summer.  One set of would-be parents gave me a hard time, though.  There were plenty of sheltered rafters on which to build a nest, but they wanted a niche directly above the front door.  We let them have it one year, but it meant angry flutterings everytime the door was opened, not to mentioned spashes of mud on the door and splatterings of bird poop to walk under or over.  The next year you hung some newspaper pages along the ledges and it worked; no swallows even tried that spot.  But this spring a pair of potential swallow parents thought a nest above the front door would be just the thing.  I tried putting up strips of paper that I figured would blow in the wind and chase them away.  It looked kind of odd, but interesting.  I figured it was working until I saw a swallow squeeze in between the paper strips and attempt build a nest right there.  I resorted to what you did:  I taped whole pages of newspaper across every potential nesting ledge.  At that, they gave up.

Fledglings, in their old spot.

I've made paths in the field again, using the same tracks you began mowing eight years ago.  I've kept them all mowed for several years now.  But I gave up a while back on the long track you made that went as far at the road and circled around the edge of the field, the one that often had standing water in a wet spring in the sections furthest from the house.  It's probably nearly as wet even now, in mid June, and I'd have gotten stuck for sure, so I gave up on that one.

The front steps that had marks from your crampons have been replaced by new, sturdier steps.  It was an extra job that was done along with building a new woodshed.  I won't have to build a stand-alone woodpile next winter like the ones you used to build. And taught me how to build.

Sometimes I feel I am still living in your house.  It's that bookshelf full of your cookbooks.  I was never a collector of cookbooks, and I was never much of an experimenter with recipes, so I didn't need all this data the way you did.

Ah, the bookshelves.  You are there in the poetry books, and the mounteering guides, and the books on lichen, and mushrooms, and tracking, and the art books that you bought.  I read a note the other day you had written to your old friend Arnie in Israel in which you asked him how it was he never expressed an interest in nature.  You had a hard time comprehending that.

In the basement there is still camping gear.  You taught me camping, and camp cooking, and backpacking.  In the workshop there are endless numbers of nails and screws and mysterious oils and glues.  There are, laughably, duplicates of nails and screws and the mysterious oils and glues.  If something was good, surely it was worth buying again.  This is why there are eight hammers and a dozen screwdrivers.  I don't lack for tools.

Thank you.

BEYOND THE OTTOMAN REACH, BEYOND THE WAR

Further North in the Balkans

A vision of the countryside, in Zagreb, Croatia

As we left Sarajevo behind and headed north in Croatia we were leaving what once been the Ottoman Empire. At the time of its greatest expansion around the late 1600’s its territory stretched from Algiers to Mecca, Belgrade to Basra. Of the Balkans it had encompassed what is now Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, and a substantial part of Croatia. But there were no more minarets as we neared the border with Hungary.  And no more Turkish coffee.

Karanac, near the Hungarian border, hasn't much in the way of traffic.

A Farming Town in Croatia

As all houses were once taxed based on the number of windows facing the street exceeding two,
they were built short in front (two windows) and extended far back. 

The house where I stayed.  It too was L-shaped.

We were in Karanac, a small town in a farming area–in flatland for the first time in a while, and only a dozen miles from the Danube that forms the border with Hungary.  You see the drying chilis, and can taste Hungary here in the paprika flavored food. Many locals are Hungarian.  The farm where we stayed was almost entirely self-sufficient.  We helped prepared some of our food, made cheese, and helped prepare a delicious soup* that was cooked over a fire.  All the vegetables came from the farm, as did the eggs, the meat (chicken, home-made sausage), jams, breads, and probably much more.  The couple that runs the place are remarkably industrious. Not only do they grow and prepare the food and care for the animals, they have decorated the entire place with stencil designs. It is a model farm in many ways, a deliberate effort to create a farmstay that appeals to visitors.  It's no coincidence that on tourist sites the town of Karanac is referred to as an “ethno village,” where one can experience “far gone, past times.”

One of our hosts, and one of their friendly dogs

Many delicious foods came from this kitchen; fresh-made jam-filled donuts are covered on the tabletop.  The walls are covered with home-made stencils.

We helped make theses cheese the day before. 

The soup we helped prepare was cooked in clay pots over a wood fire.

"Far gone, past times" is in some ways all too true.  As in other regions of the Balkans, the younger generation is leaving or has already left for greener pastures, metaphorically speaking.  Several of the houses in this lovely small town are empty and abandoned if they are not for sale. We met one householder whose son lives in Ireland, another in England.  They are hoping to sell but they’re not optimistic.  An elderly woman passed by selling eggs from her wheelbarrow.  A widow, alone, her grown children far away, she is making do.

We met this 82-year old woman who was walking down the street selling eggs
from a wheelbarrow. Her children live somewhere else in Europe.

Our guide Vladka talks with a woman who is hoping to sell her house and
move to northern Europe where her children now live.

Still, the town has possibilities.  The L-shape of the Danube-style house lends itself to becoming a row of guest bedrooms.  And the houses are available, probably inexpensive.  Maybe tourism will provide a better economic future.  

A picture of TIto, once head of what was once Yugoslavia, adorns this abandoned farmhouse in Karanac.

To make some extra money in hard times many locals took in orphans from the Balkan war as foster children. We were invited for dinner at a nearby house one evening.  A member of their family is one of those orphans, now an adult.  For him, it worked out happily.

Dinner at a home down the road. Their foster son, fluent in English,
translated. The dad is an avid follower of American sports.

Past the War Zones: Natural Sites

Unlike the Karanac area, neither Plitvička National Park in Croatia nor Postojna Cave in Slovenia are in need of publicity.  In both of these remarkable places we encountered tourist group after tourist group obsessed with selfie-photography. Many visitors took selfies without even looking at what they were standing in front of.  

And they were standing in front of some amazing places.

Plitvička is an unusual natural area where a river spills into turquoise lakes that spill into other turquoise lakes. The lakes are separated by travertine dams formed of carbonate minerals, very like the chemistry of the hot springs in Yellowstone.  The rock here is karst, limestone, that wears away to create underground rivers, caves, and sinkholes. The lakes and travertine dams are the result of a complicated chemical interplay of water, limestone, temperature and vegetation. 

The entire Plitvička area

It must be even more beautiful when the water is high; an unusually dry spring decreased the water flow. 

I’ve been in caves before, but I’ve never been in a cave like Postojna.  It's not that the structures are unique, it's the size of it that's impressive.  Tram cars, not unlike what one may encounter at, say, Disney World, zip you through underground room after room for about three miles. After the tram ride brings you deep into the cave, you begin a long hike through more of this twelve mile long cave on a path where many have gone before.  Tourism is nothing new.  The cave has been an attraction since at least 1819 when the Austro-Hungarian Archduke paid a visit. In fact, it was fitted out with electricity before the city of Ljubljana.  Tourism priorities! And it has wartime history: In WWI Russian prisoners-of-war were forced to build a bridge over a deep chasm in the cave (part of the trail today), and in WWII occupying German forces used it to store airplane fuel.  Which eventually exploded in an attack and destroyed a section of the cave.

A Word on the Countryside

Houses aren't thatched today, but under that snow there is a familiar conical hay bale. Outside of cities many women still wear kerchiefs and longish skirts. (Painting on glass from the "Museum of Naive Art," Zagreb.)

A house at the edge of a small town, houses just outside of town, and houses further from town may all have in common small, neat, hand-worked gardens.  The gardens are larger than any garden one might grow to get some fresh tomatoes or zucchini in the summer, but are far from large scale. I saw many people, mostly elderly, hoeing and planting.  Each house had neatly stacked firewood.  Haystacks were made old-style, the way all haystacks were made before there were mechanical balers.   The countryside looked the way Austria probably looked many years ago.  At least the parts that I saw. 

   

Every restaurant in the countryside greeted us with a
shot of the local brandy (e.g., slivovitz)

Beekeepers in Slovenia like to decorate their hives with plaques like this, but this is an early and pretty grotesque example (old wife ground up, replaced by young wife), reminiscent of old fairy tales.

A gingerbread-decorating business in a small country town.

Hill Country and Back to Baroque

Back on the Dalmatian coast I felt far removed from the Balkan war, and in fact those battles didn’t actually reach here, although the area is still part of Croatia.  Our guide Vladka lives in this area, and it is the place her brother called home when he was called up to the Yugoslav army during the Balkan war.  (See the post “Into the Land of the Balkan War.”)  

The Istria peninsula pushes up to Trieste, Italy, and feels very much like Italy, as did Kotor in Montenegro, and Dubrovnik in the southern part of the Dalmatian coast.  This is hardly surprising given its history as part of the Venetian Republic, not the Ottoman Empire, for several hundred years until just before 1800.

It’s hard to think of war anyway, when you’re in the land of truffles, olive oil, and wine. And harder still when you’re in a town on the Croatian Riviera, a town like Opatija. Or in a hill town that could as easily be in Tuscany.

The hill country of Croatia. (This painting is in the "Museum of Naive Art" (folk art) in Zagreb.)

A hill town in Istria. Could that be a superhighway at the upper left?  Not!  It's a canal built in the
Napoleonic era. A road follows alongside..

A shop selling truffles both white (white-ish) and black, plus other goodies.

Truffle hunting is done with dogs, in this case a lab mix. He was distracted en route by other interesting odors.
(If only we had truffles growing here. Goodness knows, I've got the dog for it!)

Opatija, on the Croatian coast just south of Trieste.

The seaside in Opatija. (I learned the Adriatic is saltier than the Mediterranean.)

By the time we entered Slovenia we were thoroughly back in Baroque.  Like Zagreb in Croatia, the architecture in Ljubjana is strongly a product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Fairy tale land, surrounded by snowy mountains.  

A fiew of Zagreb from the heights of the old town.  Yes, people still smoke here. At least they are neat about
where they leave their butts.

Ljubljana, a view of the castle and the old town

Ljubljana at ground level one rainy day. The downtown is lively and full of bicycles and offers hybrid transport. 

Waste is separated in all categories; the bins lead to dumpsters under the sidewalk.
Ljubljana is one of Europe's greenest cities

Lake Bled, castle and village, a short drive from Ljubljana

It was a good place to end up, Ljubljana.  I couldn’t help but think about the waste, both literal (trash) and metaphorical (people without hopeful economic futures) in so many of the other areas I’d just visited. Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, much of Croatia––all part of Europe, but not the Europe we usually think about.  Slovenia, an exception, perhaps, has been more prosperous than the rest of the Balkans for some time.  And its capital, Ljubljana, was the only city we visited that was so obviously “green.”  Maybe committing to being green is something that only a degree of prosperity allows.  I hope not. But a country most likely needs a stable government in order to make such a commitment.  It will be a while before that happens throughout the Balkans.

#1 Eco car, Slovenia!

___

*The soup in Karanac, as I remember it, with guesstimated amounts:  
(I made this soon after I got back and it was excellent.)

Black-eyed peas that have soaked overnight (~one cup or so)

Onions, chopped small

Carrots, chopped small

Garlic cloves (several), minced

Celeriac, chopped small (which I couldn’t find, but on impulse used bok choy)

Tomato juice, maybe half a cup

Salt

Paprika, sweet, a generous amount, maybe 1/3 cup 

Concentrated chicken bouillon (tablespoonful or more, my best guess to substitute for something added that looked similar)

Water, and an appropriate amount of water.  
Meat, cut into small pieces (I didn’t know what kind so I improvised with bacon)

Water, appropriate amount

Boil, then simmer for several hours.