WHAT DARK AGE?

The dark, descending?

The dark beginning in the middle of the afternoon.  That type of dark. Much rain, sleet, cloud, glimpses of sun.  No turning for cheeriness in the news, that's certain.  Not often the place to find cheeriness of course but honestly, this time it seem worse than usual. On all fronts.

Angry lake, in rare and beautiful sunshine

How will this present we have been living in look in hindsight?  Unless we're around some 40-60 years from now we're not going to find out.  But I can still wonder.  What will it be called?  The Age of Unreason?  Age of ---?

Imagine if the people living in Florence in around 1550 or so knew they were living in the Renaissance.  When the wealthy looked back on their best days as they grew old maybe they remembered them as a Golden Age. Which for them it was, literally golden, all things considered.  Those at the bottom of the heap might have been surprised had they known there was a renaissance happening, as they only just managed to survive their first naissance, never mind doing it again.  

The period of time we're living in now has been named the Anthropocene, at least by those writers concerned about climate change.  It's defined as "a period of time during which human activities have been the dominant inflluence on climate and the environment."  That seems clear to the naked eye.  It amounts to a climactic achievement in one sense, as the Christian Bible commanded humans to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."  We have indeed managed all those things.  The multiplication part was easy, and the subduing and dominating a bit harder, call it a work-in-progress.  It was 1989 when Bill McKibben wrote "The End of Nature."  He was a bit early.

A work in progress because with as much as we've learned and begun to understand about, for instance, animal behavior or the inner workings of forests, both are still being stressed, subdued, and under pressure, dominated, by us humans.  Working to preserve and save or sustain both kinds of living things is a pretty daunting prospect. Even more so when you consider how challenging it is even at the most local level.  Like the local level right here in Vermont.  

As for instance:  This state is seen as being environmentally advanced compared with many other states.  And yet:  On the wildlife issue our state still operates in 19th century mode.  Yes, 19th, not even 20th.  I'm thinking of our Fish and Wildlife Commission which continues to support all sorts of trapping (think leghold traps, body crushing traps, etc.), hounding, and unrestricted coyote killing, long shown to be against the wishes of a majority of Vermonters.  If we can't be good enough, who can?

We're considered fairly socially advanced too, and I suppose we are on a couple of issues.  It's easy of course when our current demographics show 93% of us are white, a mere 1% Black, and other races combined add up to no more than 4%.   We're not tested much here on racial issues, so most people come across as unbiased.  But who knows, really?  

BEWARE OF THE DOG, warning found in Pompeii

Anyway, getting back to the Anthropocene.  That's the name of an Age, not an Era.  Our own time or era will eventually be dubbed the Era of something or other.  What overarching dominating force, for good or evil, might typify the times we're living in?   The worst title can think of would be the Trump Era.  It would include both a metaphorical and real time span, the living person plus the culture that was prepared to see him as their leader or idol or whatever even before he was on the scene, and the ripple effects that exist during and will exist after his wielding power time.  Unfortunately, we are not yet at the after.  We may not even be anywhere near the after.  Now that is quite a scary thought for our country and its future.  But wait: just the other day he said when he wins he's only going to be dictator on day one.  Maybe the question he was responding to caught him by surprise.  But who knows what he really wants.  Well, actually we do. History tells us dictators don't tend to be shy about telling you what they're going to do.  They lay it right out there.  Almost like a dare.  And we can assume the worst that can happen will happen to others.  Not to us.  And elsewhere.  Not here.

 

Perhaps all will be well after all.  Just another Age, just another Era after all.  

 

 

.  

LOOKING BACK ON OCTOBER 30TH FROM ANOTHER WORLD

The end of October came around again and November moved in.

I wanted to remember October 2016.  And then I didn't.  Days passed.

I wrote something back then.

Inexplicably I came across that again.  So I am putting it up here...

Ken:  Along the coast somewhere in Peru, with a pisco sour and a raffish look.

The world is already a different one than Ken knew.  I can’t really believe that time has passed since October 30th, 2016.  The election happened. That was enormous. I went to Washington for a weekend and I want to tell him about it.  I bought a dress he hasn’t seen.  The leaves fell. It snowed, and the outdoors is different too.  

 

I’ve been gathering and reading all his notebooks. They remind me of things I already know. He didn’t like me poking around when he was alive.  

 

Ken was an explorer of the natural world. He was filled with curiosity.  He was an observer. He wanted to understand the universe.  He wanted to understand the behavior of an insect.  He loved to quantify things.  Ken was intense about every pursuit.  And he was always modest about it.  He never boasted.

 

***

We had adventures together.  Many trips we took were more than just visits to places.  They were explorations, they were adventures.  We collaborated on planning them.  Our last big trip to the Galapagos happened only a year ago. That one was his idea.

 

His interests all through throughout his life spanned an amazing range.  I loved the fact that he was always up for something, something new.  Sports he tried out were technical climbing, hang gliding (only briefly, thank God), rollerblading, scuba diving.  Others he stuck with for years:  fly fishing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, downhill skiing (even last winter), running, bicycling, hiking.  He took long walks as recently as September.

 

***

I’ve been reading through all his notebooks. There are a lot of them.  Most of them are half-filled. When he had something he wanted to make notes about he grabbed the nearest one.  When he was in a shop that sold small notebooks he picked up more of them. 

 

A lot of his thoughts he took notes on were about science.  He wrote:

 

“For thirty years I worked as a physical chemist, but I don’t consider myself a scientist.  I am a fan of science, an amateur in the original sense of “amateur” –– a lover of science.  Much of the science I love is not chemistry. Had I been better at math, I might have been an astronomer or a physicist.  Chemistry seemed to sit in the middle of all this.  The child in me was delighted by the smells and colors:  the marvel of electricity generated by chemical batteries, and the explosions and pyrotechnics.”  

 

But he really was a scientist at heart.  He wrote:

 

“It’s the sense of discovery, the rhythm of theories and ideas which enlarge, encompassing one another.  A cycle of new insights, overturning earlier insights, only to encompass them.

 

On walks he would have a magnifying glass so he could examine a bug, a mushroom, animal scat, or a lichen.

 

And then there was art, and opera, music, and the theater––until his hearing got so bad even headphones didn’t help.

 

He was a scientist too when he was cooking, always trying the same dish in different ways, never satisfied merely to repeat it, even if I told him it was perfect just the way it was.

 

***

 

The notebooks are full of lists–shopping lists, to-do lists, lists of interests to follow up on, lists of phenomena he wanted to understand, lists of animal or plants he observed, lists of behaviors he wanted to improve upon.  There are short essays on a huge range of topics, and there are travel notes.  Some of his lists are interrupted by recipes.

 

***

 

 

More than ten years ago, after he was retired, he took a writing class in Cambridge taught by Mopsey Strange Kennedy (not a name to forget) and he began to write often, mostly about his early life.  After that he took a poetry class.  Both these classes helped him look back on his life, especially his early life.  There was a reason for that.  

 

As some of you may know, he was haunted––scarred even––by the death of his birth mother.  After she died, an aunt moved in to take care of him and his brother, but after a while she moved away to live her own life.  His dad, who by now had begun drinking more heavily, sent both boys to live with their maternal grandparents who lived nearby.  It wasn’t long before his grandmother died, and not long after the grandfather he’d begun to care deeply about died too.  Ken wrote about these losses again and again.  Here is an excerpt from his notebooks:

 

“I was young, three and a half years old, when my mother died in childbirth.  Seventy-five years later I can remember the time.  My brother was brought home from the hospital, and I have the image of a few women carrying him upstairs at our house.  I can see myself as a small figure behind them, as if I were on the ceiling looking down at that small boy climbing behind the group.  That image, and a powerful sense of loneliness and abandonment, was compelling.

 

In middle age I met a neighbor from that time.  She remembered me, and my telling her that my mother had gone to heaven.  I recalled fantasizing as a child that I could climb a tree and go to heaven to see her. She recalled how I told her I was going to go up into the sky where she was, and that I had looked like a little old man. I remember seeing a movie about a tree in front of a house where climbing the tree was linked to a grandfather and death.  I have always liked the view of great spreading trees with lower climbable branches.”

 

His actual mother was never allowed to be mentioned in his childhood household.  It was as if she’d never existed.  That was only part of his story. 

 

***

He was often pessimistic, sometimes depressed.  But he also wrote this.  He titled it “Me, Myself and I.”

 

“I want to tell you about myself.  It’s complicated because along with myself and me, there’s also my mind which has a mind of its own, so that’s four of us.  That as far as I know.  There could be more lurking back there.

 

Myself doesn’t talk much, although he wants to.  It can be hard to drag anything out of him.  He’s ambivalent and sulks a lot.  He’s not that happy a person mostly, but when he is, it’s a rush for me.  I feel like dancing then.  And laughing.

 

“I’m pretty gregarious.  I like people, I like the out of doors.  I like parties.  I like to fish and ski.  I liked my job when I had one, and I like not having one now.  There’s not a lot I don’t like or can’t tolerate.  I don’t like mean people.  I don’t like being pushed around.  Mostly I enjoy my life.”         [1/06/04]

 

***

 

In his notebooks, the notes, and the lists, drawings and the essays, are a window into his mind.   They tell me how hard he was working those last months to corral his wide-ranging interests as his brain was changing.  

 

One to-do list reads as follows:

 

1.     One:  “Gather firestarter wood

2.     Two:  Draw birds

3.     Clean trash bin

4.     Saturday night Norma’s birthday dinner

5.     Check re Bill for lunch

6.     Higgs boson

7.     Is there anything special at the center of the universe, galaxies, nebulae?  All flying away from the Big Bang?”  

 

 

He made notes about what he was reading to help him remember.  There are notes on the plots of books, and other things, like:

 

o   “How much dark matter is there?

o   The five pillars of Islam

o   Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation”

o   The poetry of T.S. Eliot ”  (and comments on Eliot’s metaphors of loneliness)

 

He thought a lot about what was going on in his mind:

 

“I am remembering a series of sketches at an Alzheimers [art] exhibition.   First there

was the initial drawing.  The initial drawing begins to change.  Face fragments and gaps appear, then distortion in a series of images, and a shattered visage at the last.  Captured is a slow loss of faculties, of interests, especially by the gaps in the image where what was, is gone, irretrievably.  Humanity is lost in the void.”

Elsewhere he wrote:

 

“Instead of the flotsam (ideas) following the current of my thought, they are trapped in the whirlpools on the surface; circulating, not following the train of thinking.  Part of brain that enables sequential steps is impaired.”  [2013]   

 

What goes on in cognitive impairment causes a loss of initiative, prevents movement on complicated tasks.  Same reason I can’t dance well.”   

 

On the next page he wrote: “Learn to dance.”

 

 

Then this, on a page by itself:   [2005, unattributed] 

 

My soul’s wings are clipped and

A devilish cat approaches in the night.    

 

***

 

Everyone who knew Ken, those who knew him well and all those who came to know him, from Vermont to Australia, knew he was a man of “sweet strength and kindness.”  (That phrase isn’t mine; it comes from a sympathy note.)  As he grew older he had compassion for every living thing.  He like sad stories less and less.

The first thing I knew about Ken was his laugh.  It was infectious.  It was filled with joy.  I can still hear it.

 

 

There are lines from an Irish ballad that have been haunting me:

 

Many the mile with thee I’ve traveled,

Many the hour, love, with thee I’ve spent

I dreamed you were my love forever

But now I know, love, you were only lent.

IT'S A JUNGLE OUT THERE

 

Do you really want to go there?  

  

I had a guest from Cambridge, Massachusetts a few weeks ago who told me how to avoid getting bitten by mosquitos.  Which I was complaining about.  I needed to get a Thermacell  electric repellant that kept mosquitos at a distance of 15 feet!  I know she felt I was being dismissive when I said “Hah! Not a chance!”  After a day or two she pretty much got where I was coming from.  

 

Mosquitos breed in standing water.  Everybody knows that.  What do you do when every couple of days there’s standing water, like, everywhere?  Locally there have been about twenty-two inches of rain in July and August.  That doesn’t even count September which has been producing more of the same.  And now that it’s well into that month, and almost past time for those mosquitos to quit biting, many of their predators are gone, too. Where are those dive-bombing swallows when you need them!  Why schedule such an early departure when there’s so much to eat right here?  Come on!

 

You think maybe I’m exaggerating?

Lesley, ready for hostilities, i.e., going outdoors 

The little white square above was intended to be a short video of Chris in similar anti-mosquito gear, but shown with mosquitos.  []Alas, it stubbornly refused to load.]

 

Anyway, here’s the real dirt about mosquitos.  They won’t stop biting until it cools off – being cold-blooded creatures – meaning a number of 50 degree days in a row.  So, they can stick around until October. Or maybe into October.  Apparently, by that time they are active in the day rather than the night.  Big deal.  Right now of course it’s 24/7.  

 

Can I tell you now about the crickets?  A banner year!  According to the Vermont Center for Ecostudies in Norwich, Vermont: 

“Because they overwinter as nymphs Spring Field Crickets hatch in early spring and mature enough to mate and begin their singing by late spring.  They continue singing and mating until late June or early July, when they finish laying their eggs and die off.”

They are not, I repeat, not, dying off.

 

In the lawn you might notice crickets as well as grasshoppers, not unusual for late summer.  It’s when they congregate that you can appreciate how many there really are.  My pool is one of those popular places. Crickets like to hang out on the “critter rescue” pad on one side of the pool, the idea being that, let’s say, frogs that jump into the pool will swim around trying to escape (realizing, perhaps, that it’s not a real pond) and will eventually arrive at the pad where a ramp will lead them out.*  For crickets, however, it functions more like their diving platform because, honestly, that’s how they use it.  They hop on, and jump into the pool.  Eventually, when I’m around to rescue them – the small ones get rescued by hand, but the big crickets call for the net – they will sink to the bottom.  As for the newly rescued, more likely than not, back in they go. 

It doesn’t take long for them to accumulate.  The drowned crickets (and occasional grasshopper) at the bottom of the pool aren’t a representative sample.  The skimmer basket, on the other hand...I had to put on a rubber glove before I dared put my hand inside.  A gigantic black spider floated on top.  Below, a four inch deep layer of crickets had accumulated over a period of maybe five days.

 

 

Deceased crickets in the skimmer basket, 4 inches deep.

Now, about the plants! 

This year I made a new raised bed closer to the house than the old beds that were ridiculously far away.  The harvest this wet summer has been amazing.  Basil seedlings turned into little shrubs, parsley into bouquets, tomatoes in to a bounty, and cucumbers – they were kinds of odd.

 

So many tomatoes.  This is my third batch, two having already been frozen,
and at least that many eaten in salads and sauces.

A bumper crop at my local farm and supplier of eggs:  they're giving them away!

 

Along with everything else, my cucumber plants were thriving.  The baby cucumbers looked promising.  Early on one turned green and looked to be the right size for picking, and I gave it away, expecting to have many more than I could even eat. The remaining baby cucumbers were white and stayed white as they grew. I waited for them to turn green.  But they were still white, frustratingly white. I waited some more. Then they blew up like some weirdly mutated thing. I know zucchinis can turn giant, especially when you haven't been paying attention, but cucumbers? I figured I’d eat one anyway, but it didn't have any taste. I harvested only a single, perfect, green cucumber. 

My giant, white, tasteless cucumbers

And the field!  The wildflowers in mid-summer were prolific and beautiful.  I was glad there wouldn't be mowing until August.  But August came and went without a window of dry weather for cutting, drying and baling.  Many fields around here were hayed, but the season was a poor one for almost all farmers because of so much wet.  Every farm has wet areas.  My field has a damp section, a swale, right in the middle.  It still hasn’t been mowed, and I have no idea when it might be. 

The grasses grow, and keep growing.

* When the pool was new, and before I installed the critter rescue pad, I came upon a garter snake desperately trying to get out. I saw it throw the top part of itself over the lip, but there was too much weight behind the front part to pull itself out, so it kept swimming around the perimeter.  I tried to grab it with the skimmer but that only terrified the snake, so I finally had to use my hands and lift it out. It was time to put the rescue pad to use.

ANXIETIES. WET/DRY, FIRE/FLOOD ?

Always look behind you?

What goes around comes around?

or, Urns are round, idiot!

The arrow doesn't disappear into thin air. It comes back at you...got to pay attention.

Events that we think happen only elsewhere don't anymore.  They happen here, there, and almost anywhere.  Climate change changes the odds on everything.  No one is immune.

 

DRY/FIRE

 

The first time I saw the aftermath of a major wildfire was in November 2017.  I was passing through Santa Rosa, California, on the way to Napa.  Just weeks before, the Tubbs fire had burned some 36,000 acres had destroyed nearly 6,000 buildings­ there, almost reaching Napa Valley.  Entire residential areas were destroyed. Along narrow winding roads through forests with downed trees and others blackened by fire I got glimpses of driveways at the ends of which sat burned out cars, half melted pickup trucks, and piles of debris that had once been houses.  I tried to imagine what it must have been like, navigating roads like this through burning forest where one fallen tree could block the only way out. This was the first time I’d fully grasped how wildfires could eat up entire residential areas.  Not just forest.  The next year another fire ate up the town of Paradise.  But that was in California, too, I thought.  Then a fire in 2022 leveled an entire subdivision called Sagamore, in Colorado. “It was 200 yards from a Costco,” a resident said, “Why would I have to worry about fire. It’s, like, suburbia, you know?”  It burned to the ground in minutes. But that was in Colorado. In 2023 it was the town of Lahaina in Maui.  It also burned to the ground in minutes. Maui!

 

Near Santa Rosa, California, November 2017

WET/FLOOD

It was a humid and hot weekend.  Dinner was outdoors.  Two houseguests, singers here for the opera Fidelio at the Town Hall Theater joined a summer spread of barbecued ribs, salads–an ordinary hot day dinner.  It was Memorial Day weekend, nearly June, and a day that usually opens a summer of hot sunny days. It turned out to be one of maybe a handful of days that I had dinner, or any meal, for that matter, outdoors.  The first days of summer were sunny, but later in the month the sky often became a hazy gray.  You could smell the air.  It was smoke from the many wildfires far away in Canada.  Then there came rain, and more rain.  

Early in summer I had asked the farmer who mows our field to wait until after the first of August because of endangered meadowlarks and bobolinks.  These birds nest in open fields in June and July, but at that very time there are few fields that aren't being mowed.  Farmer Dan often waits until August anyway, having many other acres elsewhere to deal with.  The rain brought one gift, however.  As showers continued in July they gave birth to what was probably one of the best display of wildflowers I've seen in the field.  Then came the mosquitos, beneficiaries of all those pools of water. It’s well after August first now, the field is still soggy, and mowing isn’t going to happen any time soon.

 

  

 

On July 11 there were serious floods in Montpelier, Barre, and Ludlow, Vermont, making national news, FEMA intervention kind of bad news.  But many smaller towns had flooding too. Some people had water in their basements.  Culverts were washed out.  Landslides happened, one nearby in Ripton. Farmers lost hay crops, and most of those hay crops have stayed lost. A local blueberry farm never opened for picking. 

The falls at Middlebury, July 14

The falls in Vergennes, July 19

The annual Addison Field Days went on as usual, despite the wet. I had to wear my most mud-friendly shoes at our annual Addison Field Days fair. Parking is in a grassy meadow which typically turns into mud after a rain. Fairgoers are used to mud, the Addison County sticky clay type of mud, but this summer “It was wild,” as someone said. Hundreds of cars got stuck and had to be pulled out by tractor.  Each day it got worse. A single tractor driver was the only person pulling cars out of the mud, and it went on non-stop. I heard horses were used on at least one occasion.    Weeks afterwards it looks like a partially plowed field.

Parking at Field Days

Worst than mud:  a destroyed house on Route 125 in nearby Ripton after a landslide

 

Way beyond our local universe, an ocean way toward the east and a continent away to the west the wet and the hot and the dry were in extremis.  Temperatures in the high 100’s in the south and southwest in this country, and in much of southern Europe. In all too many of these places, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Switzerland, and the Canary Islands, fires followed.  For the far southwest, as I write this, hurricane-driven floods are predicted.  “I’m bewildered,” said a guy from Palm Springs, where it might ordinarily rain one day a year, who wasn’t sure just how to protect whatever it was that would need protection. It is definitely bewildering.

 

 

DRY/FIRE

 

Dry spells make me feel uneasy, especially when there's wind. (Winds are famously unsettling.  The mistral, the sirocco, the foehn–none of these I think are anyone's favorites.) Here in the dry the clay soil becomes even more resistant than usual, hardening like concrete, cracking like a dry lake bed. As for wildfire in Vermont, I could find no history, no list or statistics about wildfires that have occurred here. The Department of Forestry reports only that "most wildfires in Vermont are caused by outdoor burning, campfires and logging operations" in the dry periods. Not surprisingly, these dry times usually occur in the fall but they can also arise in spring, never mind that the land looks green and damp, in the forest ground fuels and litter could be dry enough to keep a fire going once it was lit. There is no sure thing.

Not a bush, but my overgrown brush pile. I may have to wait until the ground is snow-covered to burn it.

 We need to ask our town fire warden for permission to do any burn “over three feet in diameter.”  Almost everyone who owns an acre or more of land has a brush pile. I have a brush pile and I can't seem to keep from enlarging it. The possibility of having a burn that spreads beyond the “three feet in diameter” limit doesn't sound sufficiently remote. A few years ago a farmer lit his field across the road in a planned and undoubtedly permitted burn. The burn was extensive though, covering several acres. After a while the wind picked up a little bit, just a little bit, and it began to look just a little bit scary. There was a tremendous plume of smoke, enough that the town fire department was alerted. Thankfully the fire didn't exceed its  planned perimeter and the flames eventually subsided on their own.  

I also remember all too well one day in the fall some years ago while I was out doing errands Ken tossed a pail he thought was meant to be discarded on top of a pile of leaves and brush in the woods right next to the shed. I don't know what he thought was in it.  But in the bottom of that pail were smoldering ashes.  As I pulled in the driveway I found a cloud of smoke and the beginnings of a fire frighteningly close to the shed in a pile of dry leaves and branches. I was so shocked I almost didn’t know what to do first.  What’s quickest? Turn on the water!  Find Ken!  Grab the hose!  Is it long enough? Panic.  It happens so quickly.  We managed to put the fire out. It was caught just in time. Luck, just luck. 

Site of the near thing

 

 FIRE/FLOOD?

 

I have no complaints about the wet. Easy to say, I know, I know, I’ve been fortunate not to have suffered because of the summer’s flooding. But I’ll take the wet over the dry anytime.  How do you weigh such choices, anyway?  For one thing, water is not going to surprise you in the same way as fire.  It won’t arrive in the middle of a beautiful day, will it?