NoNewsFromHere: BOUNDARIES, AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE

Boundaries: borders, restrictions, partitions, borderlines, dividing lines, cutoff points thresholds, confines, limits, outer limits, extremities, margins, edges, fringes, peripheries, perimeters...

I draw the line here. The meadow keeps trying to cross it.

Maybe I wasn't all that clear. I'm talking about physical boundaries, and very local ones at that. To the eye, they are nowhere, and yet everywhere. I like to think I'm the ruling party here, but often that seems in doubt.

I could describe them. So I will.

What put this in mind was a morning of transitions not long ago, not sure just when––time has been very mutable this past year and a half. Mask wearing was in its last official day, but I didn't know that yet. In the first store, people at the registers were masked, customers were not. (Agway) At the second, only one person at the register was masked, others not. (Hardware) At the third, about 80 to 90% of the shoppers were unmasked while all the clerks were masked. (Supermarket) At the fourth, nothing had changed at all, everyone kept their distance and everyone was masked. (Co-op) Unrestricted restrictions. It got me thinking about limits and borders, and boundaries.

MOUSELAND

Mouseland covers the same relative space as as the ratio of planetary water to land. No area is off limits. There must be hundreds (thousands?) of them in the natural and built environment. By built, I mean indoors. Indoors includes inside-type things, like a a tractor, car, a grill. For a long time I've been setting mouse traps (instant kill, lest you wonder) in the basement in winter, as they prefer a warm, non-windblown climate. My record for trapping was eleven mice one winter, a record that could easily have been greater if I'd been rigorous about keeping the traps in dabs of peanut butter. This season I decided to continue setting traps to see what, if anything, would happen. I had little thought of catching any, but yes, there they were, even in warm weather––four so far.

This brings me to another aspect of Mouseland. End-of-Life Mouseland.

Beneath the burdock (infamous for its burrs*) is my mouse cemetery. It is an above-ground
cemetery, however, as I have no mouse death ceremony, no burial.

A suburb of Mouseland, or kind of town-within-a-town, is Voleland. Voles, unlike mice, are McMansion types. No discreet little holes for them. No, they need to have massive entryways and massive exit holes. Their works pretty much ruin the neighborhood. It makes for an incredibly bumpy ride on my mower. Last summer the voles were very busy in homebuilding, and I can't help but wonder whether they will recycle the homes they've already got instead of even more construction. Or maybe I should called it de-construction.

One of altogether too many vole holes. The entrance has a 3-inch diameter.
Why is that necessary? After all, they're about the same size as mice.

THE AREA OF INTOLERANCE, FORMERLY THE AREA OF TOLERANCE

I've mentioned this already in a previous post. How lovely I used to think it was to watch the swallows make their nests on the front porch and raise their babies. Once the chicks had fledged I faced the yearly mess of swallow poop clean up. It seemed like the price I had to pay for watching them nest. They had made the nest along the molding and atop the light fixtures. Brown mud would stick on the molding, impervious to scrubbing, and white poop dribbled down the red wall. Prayer flags flapping along the molding and small rocks atop the lights have done the trick. After years of this, I'd had enough. I drew my line in the sand, so to speak. It worked.

Prayers for good fortune flap in the wind and declare this space off limits.

LOST EDEN

Last year and the year before that, and the year even before that, the swimming pond was the place to be for frogs of all sorts. They seemed happy, the evidence being the fact that they laid many eggs and produced even more frogs with each year. They swam contentedly with people around and without. If snakes or herons managed to make a meal of any of them, they were quickly enough replaced that I never noticed a change in numbers.

But, alas. The Eden is not what it was. An invasion of what first looks like an innocent moss turned out to be a virulent strain of an algae called hydrilla. Hydrilla loves to grow in quantity under the deepest water, in the shallower water, and in the shallowest water, the domain of the frogs. I countered with supposedly "good" and "safe" hydrilla killer, in appropriate amounts. Taking stock some weeks thereafter I was shocked to find fewer plants and, lucky me, just about as much hydrilla as before. There were also one, then two, monstrous bullfrogs.** It was as if those two giants were full of all the little frogs. (Actually there were still some little frogs. And tadpoles. So all was not completely lost.) Or maybe the little frogs left because the thinness of the plants wasn't to their liking. At any rate, there are lots fewer frogs in the swimming pond. Fewer plants too.

Frog Eden; the Golden Years

No more Eden. (Photo taken at about the same time of year, give or take a week or so.)

The bottom is obscured by reflections, but that green stuff is hydrilla 'way down deep. The gravel is greenish too.

Let no one say that a "natural pool" is simple to manage. Hah! You still have to watch the pH, and look after the plants, and add good bacteria at the right time, and keep an eye out for algae. You have to learn to read the water. I think (I hope) I'm there now. But it took me a long time. I've wrestled with hairy algae, which has a reputation for being hard to get rid of, but I managed that. This stuff? It's gotten to me. The result is that the pool will have to have a major rehab. Drained, cleaned, refilled, and maybe a UV filter to boot. That's not likely to happen until late summer, or, worse yet, maybe later. I haven't even swum in it yet. It's because I'm mad at it. I drew my line. Stay tuned.

PLACE OF THE ANCESTORS

It was here in the Beginning, the place of Origin.

We're talking frogs again. Before there was a swimming pond, there was the big pond. In the days of yore, before human memory of this particular site, there was a seep, perhaps a small marsh, absorbing the waters from higher ground across the meadows. It was here the frogs' ancestors lived. When the swimming pond was first built, it wasn't more than a day or so before they found their way to this new site. They seemed to like it. I remember a few years ago when my grandaughter Audrey was still afraid of frogs her kindly brother Ben captured as many as he could lay his hands on and carried them back to the Place of Origin. It wasn't a half hour before they were all back. They knew they had moved up in the world and they were planning on staying.

COYOTE VISITING AREA

This visiting area was not my choice. Skyler has an invisible boundary just a few feet behind the foreground. Two coyotes have come to this precise spot a month or two apart. The first one, a big guy, stood just behind the intersection (mid-photo), the more recent visitor about six feet closer. It happened about 8 o'clock one evening. I was upstairs when I heard Skyler in agitated barking. I looked out the window. There was Skyler and the coyote, separated by only a few feet. Skyler was at his invisible boundary line, the coyote just outside of it. When I saw how close the two were I nearly flew down the stairs. As I leapt out the back door I grabbed my coyote scare can, a tin can with pebbles inside kept just inside the door for this exact purpose, and ran out shaking it as hard as I could. The coyote left. Not in a hurry, but determinedly.

Skyler looks at this path every night, in anticipation, or fear, or curiosity. Or just because he's guarding what's on the inside of his boundary.

BEAR VISITING AREA? (URSA INCOGNITA)

This is unknown territory. There may have been a bear right here in the woods. I don't know. Skyler has often barked at mysterious beings there. A bear visited next door early one morning recently. It was a young bear and he was easily scared off. But I don't know if one has ever come here. If it did, this is where he/she would come from. There have been no obvious signs, no messed up compost, for instance. The messes I've seen there are the work of something much smaller, maybe raccoons, or opossums. Bears leave bigger messes.

What's out there? Bear? Coyote? Or just a rabbit?

Skyler catching a plume of scent. Of something...

I know where my boundaries are.

*Burdock burrs are the worst kind. Trust me, I know. This spring I bent over some plants and when I raised my head I discovered to my shock I had a headful of burrs. It took me painful hours to get them out, along with a small amount of precious hair. A lesson learned: Use only oil, oil and more oil. No water as this makes the little hooks hold even tighter.

**The size of actual bullfrogs is surprising, especially when you're used to seeing ordinary frog-size frogs. They put in mind that Australian scourge, the cane toad.