IN DEER SEASON

                       “That time of year thou mayst in me behold

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

                        Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

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

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

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

Snow showers whiten the high peaks of the Adirondacks

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

Early morning footprints in the frost

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

A thin layer of ice covers the pond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The meat chickens milling around the feeder, as usual

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

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

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

                                                  I Miss You 

                                         It was in first grade

                                        When I saw you on the bus

                                        You looked at me

                                        And I saw you write

                                        Something

                                        On a piece of paper.

                                        You gave it to me; I read it.

                                        It was “Love ya!”

                                        I want you to remember me

                                       When you look in the fourth seat.

                                       Now I am in the third grade.

                                       I miss you

                                       I miss you

                                       I miss you

                                       I looked at you in the last row.

                                       I heard someone yell “Harry,”

                                      Sit next to me!”

                                      You did.

                                      Sit next to her.

                                      And you forgot about me.

                                      I miss ya

                                      I miss ya

                                      I miss ya

                                                                                          by Carly Huston, age 8 (now 13) 

BACK IN ANOTHER COUNTRY: AFTER AMAZONIA

A newly mowed field along Plank road

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

The sugar maples at the Hustons' place

Early morning frost and fog over Lake Champlain

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

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

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

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

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

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

What kind of lives will they have?

We are so far from Belén.  

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

End of the season:  cornstalks, ready for cutting

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

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

It’s very far away from here.

The world outside the screened porch.

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

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

AMAZON, NOT-DOT.COM

A passenger ferryboat on the Amazon.  For overnight trips there are hammocks.

Our ship, the "Aqua," underway.  And luxury comfort.

Three degrees south of the equator, in Peru.  Really far from Vermont.  In many ways.

It’s the largest city in the world that has no roads leading in or out.  The only ways to get here are by plane flights from Lima, mostly, or travel by riverboat.  When you consider that Iquitos is on the western Pacific side of South America, it is intriguing to think that you can arrive by boat from the Atlantic Ocean, sailing some 2,300 miles from the 200-mile wide mouth of the Amazon all the way to Iquitos, Peru. The Amazon begins at Iquitos, technically speaking, because it is here that the Marañon and Ucayali, major rivers themselves, meet to form what from this point on is named on maps as the Rio Amazonas.  And it is here the Amazon makes its unfaltering right-hand turn to the east.  These are all facts I had been blithely unaware of.

After the Marañon and Ucayali rivers join, the Amazon, technically speaking, begins

It’s impossible to avoid talking of numbers when describing the Amazon:  it’s the largest drainage basin in the world (some 40% of South America), with tributaries pouring in from Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Brazil.  It is as much as 30 miles wide in places at high water from approximately November to June, and nearly a mile wide in Iquitos.  Yet for all its length it drops only about one inch per mile for some 4,000 miles. The water is thick and opaque with clay sediment, unlike the “black water” feeder rivers, clearer, yet darkened with tannin.  A cone of sediment some 200 miles or so long coats the ocean at its outlet.  A nightmare of navigation after dark, the river is replete with floating logs and branches that occasionally stick up like the remains of a rotting pier, and constantly shifting sandbanks.  The entire river used to flow directly past Iquitos but shifted course a few years ago, and Iquitos now lies along the Rio Italaya.  A goodly portion of the land through which the rivers flow is floodplain.

Along the Rio Itaya in the Belén sector of Iquitos, houses set to float on balsa logs line the banks.

During the wet season the water rises some 20 or more feet around Iquitos, but last year was freakish, and in March the water kept on rising and rising, flooding all the lower ground of Iquitos except for those houses built on balsa rafts.   Making matters worse, last year also brought Iquitos a dengue fever epidemic. One of our ship guides, Victor, told us how the floodwaters were so extensive a swimming anaconda grabbed a 9-year-old girl in her own flooded house.  Fortunately her screams caught the attention of her father who paddled to the house in his canoe and with a blow of his machete cut off the snake's head.  This flood was in weird contrast to the equally freakish drought of the year before.  Climate change, our guides felt, was affecting water levels, the amounts and timing of the rain, and was bringing increasingly high temperatures. 

The poorer people and new arrivals who populate the Belén sector of Iquitos saw their stilt houses flooded last March.

Our hotel in Iquitos, more than likely on terra firma.

Iquitos is bustling, heterogeneous, grubby, rakish.  In short, interesting.  Since there are no roads that lead anywhere. with the single exception of a 70 mile-long road that took 30 years to build and connects the town of Nauta, population15,000, to Iquitos, nearly everyone gets around by motocarro, a kind of covered rickshaw propelled by motorcycle, the engines of which provide a constant background roar.  Iquitos is growing wildly, already having over a population of over 600,000, fed by people from the jungle lured by possibilities of having different or better lives.  All of our guides––Cesar, Daniel, Victor, Roland––had been born in remote parts of the jungle and still have family there.  Victor’s father, for example, who lives a day’s boat trip away down the Pacaya River, still catches fish with a spear.  Near where Victor’s family lives but further away from the river where one still finds “traditional” tribes lives a group known as “cat people” because of sticks thrust through their noses that look like whiskers.  The way Iquitos is developing, its size could one day rival Manaus, the famous Brazilian frontier town in the heart of Amazonia.  But no matter how large Iquitos gets it’s likely to remain a city of two- or at most three-story buildings.  A couple of years ago some shortsighted person built a ten-story building that almost immediately started to lean as it settled into Iquitos’ soft sedimentary clay.  Instead of taking it down, the government bought it and popped several antennas on top, and it remains a decaying fungus-spotted blue eyesore.

A street in Iquitos, with the too-tall blue building in the background

On our elegant ship, where we spent a week exploring the Amazon and several other rivers, memorably the Pacaya in the pristine Pacaya-Samiria Reserve, we were coddled with nightly tasting menus of imaginatively prepared local and Peruvian food, wine, and Pisco Sours, Peru’s national cocktail.  (Peruvian food overall, including Lima, is the most interesting and delicious amalgam of flavors from the Andes, the ocean, the tropics–fruit for example–and the Amazon.)  Cocooned in our air-conditioned staterooms we could watch the insects plaster themselves on the outside on our windows after dark.  But from our short hikes we returned drenched with sweat, even though our expeditions were completed before 11 in the morning or no earlier than 4 in the afternoon.  We wore long sleeves despite the heat because of insects or the chance, say, of leaning against "punishment trees," where biting ants crawl up and down the trunks or up and down whatever is touching the trunks, hats to protect ourselves from the sun, and rubber boots because of snakes.  We knew, too, as we coasted in small launches along the rivers that the lovely welcoming riverbanks were not really as welcoming as they looked, even though malaria-carrying mosquitos were not in this area according to our ship’s guides, proof of which was that the little owl monkeys we saw can’t live in malarial areas. 

Owl monkeys, normally nocturnal, but interested in us standing below.

We would not have wanted to be abandoned for a night without shelter.  We had seen snakes on our walks, frogs, bats, and spiders, and the light-reflecting red eyes of the cayman lined both banks of the river at night.

  A "Goliath" spider

The poison dart frog

Me, gingerly holding a small cayman

Me and a three-toed sloth.  This was a visit to a friend of our guide's place, so I'm not togged up head to toe.
Holding a sloth isn't terribly smart as parasites and ants live in their fur in symbiosis with the sloth.
Fortunately, I had no open wounds.

Holding this (baby) anaconda was an entirely different thing.  It was heavy, but–honestly–felt benign.

The piraña I caught; Ken caught one of the same size.

Early explorers of the region emerged from the jungle skinny, unkempt and often unhinged.  Many of them starved:  In “The Lost City of  Z,” David Grann describes several expeditions undertaken in the 1920’s by the legendary explorer Percy Fawcett who was as famous for vanishing without a trace as for his discoveries:  “Scrounging for food, Fawcett and his men could make out only buttressed tree trunks and cascades of vines.  Chemical –laced fungi and billions of termites and ants had stripped bare much of the jungle floor.  Fawcett had been taught to scavenge for dead animals, but there were none to be found:  every corpse was instantly recycled back into the living.  Trees drained even more nutrients from a soil already leached by rain and floods.”  

Still life:  a carnivorous butterfly, feasting on a dead catfish.

They encountered sweat bees (drawn to sweat, of which there was surely an abundance, and called–horribly–“eye lickers” in Brazil), vampire bats that transmitted lethal protozoa, malarial mosquitos, maggots that infected open wounds, electric eels that sizzled the horses and dogs they had with them, fire ants, pirañas, poisonous vipers, poisonous ants, termites, caymans, trees with poisonous sap (the curare tree, for one) poisonous frogs (the poison dart frog) and leg-eating mud-holes.  In “The River of Doubt,” the tale of Teddy Roosevelt’s Amazon expedition, author Candace Millard adds:  “The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite:  Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its in habitants, every minute of every day.”  Whew.

Ken, modern day explorer

It took two of us to pull me out of the mud.

Most of the people who live along the rivers are subsistence farmers, growing small patches of corn, yucca, papaya, melons, and sometimes rice.  Most of their protein comes from fish.  In the markets we found wild boar meat, turtle meat and turtle eggs, and innumerable kinds of Amazonian fish from small catfish to paiche, the largest known freshwater fish.  New conservation practices discourage the traditional eating of manatees that are now finding protection.  Illnesses that befell explorers don’t seem to trouble the local people who use the many natural medicines of the jungle.  The local people swim and wash in the black water rivers, and many swim in the Amazon, with immunities we undoubtedly don't have.  I would be wary:  lurking in the murky water, along with the graceful gray and pink river dolphins, are pirañas and various kinds of parasites, the most notorious of which is the candiru, well known by watchers of exotic animal programs who may know why–ugly story!–you should not pee in the Amazon.

Ken feeds a young manatee at the manatee rescue center near Iquitos.  River manatees need to take mother's milk until they are a year and a half old.  This special substitute milk is supplied by the Dallas Aquarium.

We visited a school where kindergarten was crowded with beautiful cheerful faces.  But the higher the grade, the fewer students, especially girls, there were in class. An upper level secondary class (where they were learning English) held only three boys.  From everyone we met we felt warmth and hospitality, and there were always waves and smiles.  This caused us to feel almost uncomfortable, as we were invading their houses just by looking, or photographing:  living quarters, belongings and all, are vulnerable, completely open to the air, each family on a platform with few walls or coverings for them to hide behind.  What do they think about where we come from, or who we are?  If they were to leave Iquitos in any way other than by boat, where would they choose to go?  I cannot imagine how Lima would affect their senses.  None of our guides had ever seen snow.  One guide, I'm pretty sure, had been to Lima, but I don't think the others had ever left Iquitos except to travel in the jungle.

A young mother, age 25, in her home, with two of her children.  Each sibling takes care of the younger one, and they often wander on their own.  Young boys play with machetes, and I watched one four or five year old pull the tail of an anaconda.

This father is repairing his outboard motor; below and at rear is their floating kitchen.

A man fishing from his dugout canoe.

The launch from our larger boat, at right, explores a small river.

And then there were the river dolphins, gray ones and pink, and many, many birds.  By category I can name kingfishers, wading birds, vultures, hawks and kites, ibis, herons and egrets, flycatchers, swallows and swifts, tanagers and honeycreepers, orioles and blackbirds, parrots, macaws and parakeets, trogons and hummingbirds, nighthawks and nightjars, toucans and barbets, woodpeckers and woodcreepers.  I must also admit I didn’t see many of these birds very well, but when I heard our guide call out “There’s a black-fronted nunbird,” I really tried to find it.  My favorite was the "Horned Screamer."

Dark comes quickly, and early.  Those who live here wake with the sun, and go to bed with the dark.