Fragments From Floyd

Chatterbox Cafe

Outside chores rained out today: Putting metal stakes in the garden to hold the cucumber fence; getting up on the roof of the addition to clean gutters inside and out; cutting grass around the barn; getting pictures of hawkweed and fire pink; laying on the walkway watching clouds skim south in front of the cold front responsible for the lightning I hear just now in the distance. Well, if I can't work outside, I'll just bend your ear.

CAUTION! CONTENTS MAY BE SOPORIFIC. THIS POST MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS! DO NOT OPERATE MOTORIZED EQUIPMENT WHILE READING THIS BLOG!

*** I just tried out my new string trimmer between showers. It works fine, but I couldn't get motivated, overcome both by guilt and by gnats. The guilt came on as I remembered years ago giving the devil to some of my older co-workers who used 'power tools' in an age of dwindling fossil fuels. Shame on them, I said back then. My swing-blade and scythe work perfectly well, and my muscle power is a renewable resource, I chided! Sigh. And now, I have yielded to the dreaded twin buggaboos of economy of motion, and comfort. Gimp wrists will make you give up some of the idealism you had when you were full of that renewable muscle power that no longer renews so readily; and had nice, smooth cartilage surfaces at all the ball joints and bearings in the chassis. So now, well... shame on me. Ya do what ya gotta do.

*** And the gnats, just today, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, are back. It's an anticipated seasonal event. Dreaded would be the better word. They will swarm in huge numbers in August. Until then, we will suffer them only by the dozens every time we go out. Last summer, this is the way I described my infatuation with gnat behavior:

Goose Creek gnats have obviously been trained from birth to study the episode of Star Wars where the TIE Fighters find and enter the tiny opening of the Death Star. Fighter-gnats innately know how to make their way into their favorite orifice: the human ear. Their two-part buzz is perhaps their most aggravating feature, and they are fond of performing it from deep inside the Death Star...just far enough into the ear that a muddy finger-thrust only chases them down into the deadly Earwax Zone. Those that are assigned to battle stations outside the ear walk expertly with their tiny-tickly track shoes in such a way as to create an excruciating itch, especially, as mentioned, when hands and fingers are covered in bean dust or other gardening gradoo.

*** The blackberries, last year only tight dry knots during the spring drought, are exploding, everywhere! This may be the year to make blackberry wine again! Maybe it is all the moisture: many of the blossoms are tinged with pink, like these here. Black raspberries also are coming on strong, and they are my favorite berry! There aren't (yet) any wild wineberries on our place, but there are some along the road down by an old abandoned house. They seem sort of tasteless eaten fresh. Anybody have any experience with them... the bright red berries that pick clean, leaving the 'caps' behind?

*** We were walking in a friend's woods this week when Ann flushed a Ruffed Grouse. This is not uncommon, but she practically stepped on it before it sprang up suddenly and flew off through the last shafts of afternoon sun. A few seconds later, there were a dozen little grouse chicks scurrying all around under the Woodferns and Christmas ferns near Ann's feet. I went back to my photography, but only for a second before Ann hollered "Fred come here what is that!" The mother grouse had come back to defend her chicks and was fluffed up big as a watermelon, wings lifted, vibrating like a bomb fixing to go off, walking menacingly towards us! I had never seen it before, but I confess, the 'threat display' worked. Dang woodchicken had me running the other way looking for a tree to climb!

*** Our morning cereal is about to get more interesting. Ann found some wild strawberries that escaped the attention of the box turtles and grouse and chipmunks and was able to pick a cupful for breakfast. And, the other day, walking up on the steep parts of our place where we don't go so often, but often enough I thought we knew what was up there, Ann found lots of huckleberry bushes covered with small green berries. Just proved to me that I don't really know this place as well as I thought I did, and there are still surprises for us, even in our own extended back yard! It's just so overgrown with brush up on that ridge. I know! This is a job for my new ergonomically correct string trimmer!

*** New Country Business Established on Goose Creek! Tomato stakes, hiking sticks and pea brush for sale. American Electric Power has hired Asplundh (doesn't everybody know these guys in the big orange trucks?) to clear EVERYTHING from the power company right-of-way, cut down to the ground 20 feet to either side of a line falling under their powerlines. Just so happens, we have about 25 spruce trees up behind the house that lie under these powerlines. I've called AEP expressing my concerns and inquiring, nicely, about alternatives that are less destructive while still maintaining lines free of potential problems. I've marked each tree with surveyors tape. I got NO return call as promised from AEP with a judgement on the fate of our trees. The crew will be back on Monday to work behind the house. And no one will be home. Houston, we have a problem.

YOU WERE WARNED! DON'T BLAME ME!

This World is Not My Home

In this false lull between 'wars' (at least the CNN all-war-all-the-time type), it has been a matter of great mental health for me to focus exclusively on the smaller world around me once more... to plant seeds, take the binoculars and camera along on slow walks to nowhere, to pause to let words come in from books and out through unfettered writing in the early mornings. And yet, there is a guilty tension between living in the moment with what I can touch and see, and knowing at greater distances, my homeland is not at peace, nor is it peaceful.

Douglas Haynes, who lives in the "Northeast Kingdom" of Vermont, in this excellent piece from Orion Magazine, struggles with this tension between kingdoms... the world of nature's healing beauty, the words of the poet-- and the strident graphics and words of CNN and the kingdom they represent. Perhaps you too can feel his unrest living in these two worlds at once...

This winter, almost any randomly tuned-in moment of the news made clear the Bush Administration's determination to dominate the world. Yet when I turned the radio off, my anger was difficult to reconcile with what I saw out the window: the soft, white curves of hayfields; the mountains looking airbrushed with snow. I kept asking myself how I could be absorbed by the aesthetics of landscape when I'm governed by an executive branch hell-bent on empire. It was too easy, as Merwin's poem implies, to identify solely with nonhuman nature and disassociate myself from the nation that has always been my country: It is too simple to turn to the sound Of frost stirring among its Stars like an animal sleep In the winter night And say I was born far from home If there is a place where this is the language may It be my country

Mr. Haynes does not resolve this conflict, but he does ask the right questions. Thanks, Cassandra Pages, for the pointer. The discussion is apropos to the larger topic of place, and will likely see further elaboration in posts soon to come from the group of place-bloggers that are forming in community. Please join us.

Little Fish Dilution Factor

John Dvorak, writing in PC Magazine, touts blogs as "the next big thing". Duh. He makes the following prediction...

Let me stop here for a moment and make some specific predictions. Within the next year, both David Letterman and Jay Leno will make jokes about blogs and even discuss them. "Nightline" will do an entire show on blogging. San Jose journalist and blog promoter Dan Gillmor will be a guest for the episode. This is the point where blogging will become mainstream. Shortly thereafter, we will see blogging millionaires, as venture capitalists figure out ways to make money from the trend.

He allows as there is some merit in one or two weblogs, like Boing-Boing...

... But the vanity sites such as Anti-Bloggies are just asking for ridicule. Who can resist? This is especially true now that the cat fanciers and ersatz poets have come on strong in the blog world.

As both a cat fancier and an ersatz poet and cloud-watcher, I expect any day to get my nomination for my Anti-bloggie award, and am preparing my acceptance speech. I could really use that one-Mill, too, John. Email me and tell me how you see blogs producing such wealth.

How do you feel about 'blogs as the next big thing'? Dvorak guesses that soon, Microsoft will incorporate blogs into MSN, and I wonder if maybe the next step will be to slip a Microsoft blog tool into Outlook Express one or two generations down the line.

Frankly, I already am feeling like the vital essence in a homeopathic dilution, Fragments among 10,000 weblogs listed on Blogstreet a year ago, one of over 130,000 last time I checked; and this only the tip of the iceberg.

Maybe the correction for the dilution factor is to concentrate weblogs and webloggers by communities, so like can find like in this growing bable of blog. Our "Blogs about Place" community is taking shape at just about the right time, I think, and you can look for more of this affinity-grouping to take place in the future as Jay Leno hypes the A-listers and the smell of $$$ takes mainstream blogdom places I don't want to go. See you in a small pond, coming soon to your weblogging neighborhood.

Name That Insect

I'd be interested to see how long it takes for the first Fragments visitor to correctly identify the creature up on the left side of the header. The timer... starts.... NOW!

(And Ron Bailey, you can't play. We already had this discussion!)

Arthur Come Ta Visit

"I just ain't been no good since Arthur come ta visit" a grandmotherly patient told me in my first year as a therapist.

"Pardon me? Is Arthur a relative?" I asked, naively.

"Naw, lands. Arthur-Itis in ma bones, honey".

Since then, I've heard tales of bad ol' Arthur visiting all sorts of folks, and he's even come to visit me over the past couple years. And now, he has come to stay with our four-year-old Black Lab, Buster.

That's the diagnosis. I think that's right. And wrong. After looking at a hefty stack of xrays of all joints except the spine, yes, I can see the irregular margins around the back of the right 'ankle'. There are some boney changes, yes. But that observation doesn't account for his episodic malaise that seems to run concurrently with his painful periods. I still think there was an infectious agent, and even though the tick panel came back negative a few months ago (false negatives are not uncommon) I wonder if giving meds merely for pain is not missing the causative agent. But I don't think we'll ever know.

The type and location of the arthritic change is unusual enough the vet is sending the xrays to the Vet School at Tech for their analysis. Meanwhile, we'll feed ol' Buster Glucosamine and MSM, with Lodine for pain as needed, to see if we can keep Arthur's visits as few and far between as possible here at Infirmary Farms. And I guess that's about all I can say about that tonight... my wrists are killing me and it's time for my anti-inflammables, as another patient called them.

Thanks for you concern for the pup, folks. Have a great weekend.

Dog Days

Today, in a mercifully little while, I will be taking Buster to the vet for general anesthesia so they can take xrays of his joints and do manipulation to see what the sructural integrity of his right hip and knee is. Hip dysplasia and/or a partially torn ACL ligament are possibilities, on top of his polyarthralgia from what we believe to be a tick-borne illness. I'm afraid of what they will find; and afraid they will find nothing to explain his recent lameness and pain. We can't watch him suffer and do nothing. But our something my turn out to be nothing, other than expensive. Such is life with our beloved animal companions.

Our beloved animal companion this morning is NPO-- nothing by mouth-- prior to anesthesia. Buster is Nothing But Mouth at 5:00 in the morning. He is bewildered how we can't understand our role in filling his bowl, putting it on the placemat outside the back door, first thing when he gets up in the morning. What! Did we go senile. Feed Me! He is driving me crazy with is insistance to be fed and 7:00 can't come soon enough. Poor pup. What must be going through his doggy brain?

Out of curiosity, I just typed "buster" into the search form at the top of Fragments. Lots of post include or are about the dog. He is very much a part of the family, and I'm no less concerned about him... well not much less... than I would be about one of the kids. With them out of the nest, I guess Buster is our 'child' now. Our fur-covered, slightly retarded, thoroughly guileless four legged child.

We should have a diagnosis by this afternoon.

WaterWorld

I had a most interesting conversation last night with an engineer professor who is 'on loan' to Virginia Tech from I believe, the University of Johannesburg, in South Africa. We have spent several months in weekly meetings with this man and his wife, part of the 6 or 7 couples we meet with in a church home-group. I had understood by inference that he was a researcher of some distinction, but had never known exactly what it was he did. Last night, over the punch bowl, I asked him.

His expertise is in converting energy into power. Power, you remember from physics class, is 'energy doing work'. Driving turbines, powering engines, that sort of thing. He has been in the field for more than 30 years, involved in electrical fuel for automobiles going back more than 20 years, as well as many other major projects around the world.

I asked him his thoughts on the potential of hydrogen as an energy source to replace fossil fuels, given what seems like the obvious geopolitical reasons to do so ASAP. We discussed this a bit, and at one point his demeanor changed from excited and engaged to defeated. He began to talk about per capita energy consumption, and how there seemed to be no end to our hunger for energy. Americans, and eastern Europeans are, as you know, using many times the world per capita average. "What will happen when the other 9/10ths of the world's population, China and India, for instance, begin to approach American levels of energy use?" He felt that there was no way to effectively bring about a voluntary decrease in energy 'needs'. "The best thing I can do is try to make energy conversion more efficient", he said. And this has been his life's work.

"I tend to be an optimist. But in the end, the increasing total of all of the energy we will use around the world in coming years-- from hydrogen, biomass, whatever we use-- will end up as heat. We are going to have problems with the heat". (layman's translation of his very technical explanation, sorry)

This conversation was especially meaningful because earlier in the day, I had read two related articles in New Scientist dealing with climate change. One, described how in a warming planet, the cloudline was moving up mountains more and more each year. It mentioned the Appalachians, especially the Spruce-Fir forest that depends on cloud condensation as a part of it's moisture source and of the effect on the amphibians (particularly salamanders) that are impacted by rising clouds.

Concerned about the effect of a rising cloud ceiling on this forest boundary, the researchers examined data from 24 airports located along the south-west to north-east axis of the Appalachians. Airports routinely measure the cloud ceiling because it is important to pilots.

Richardson's team found that in the 18 most northerly airports, the cloud ceiling has climbed an average of six metres per year since 1973. "Over 30 years, that's 180 metres, which is about six tree heights," says Richardson. "It is pretty stunning."

The second recalculates how much more rain we can expect (a lot) if greenhouse gasses are figured into the models of potential change. Apparently no one had thought about this effect of greenhouse gases on rainfall:

...In response to high levels of carbon dioxide, plants shrink their stomata - the holes in the surface of their leaves through which gases pass in and out. This drastically reduces water loss from the plants, leaving more water in the soil.

When Betts included these changes in his models of groundwater levels, he found the effect could increase groundwater by 10 per cent over the next century - 10 times as much as global warming alone.

Nobody knows for sure how the planet will handle it. But there seems to be no end to our insatiable appetites for energy. And although no current model of future change is perfect, in the closed system of our planet, major changes certainly will take place. Americans are the world's role models for energy consumption. If there are no checks on energy use and the heat it produces, at some point, there will be a check on the producers. And in the end, the world will come back to some kind of equilibrium, with Mr. Malthus' Utterly Dismal Prediction correct in the end.

The best course of action still, I think, is Think Globally. Act Locally. I'm willing to do that. I always turn off lights when I leave the room. But just don't make me give up my computer. Or gas-powered string trimmer or chain saw. Or my truck. Or CD player, or...

Are You Alone(r)?

I had planned in my mind a longish post, more polished than the usual off the top of my head approach, with lots of good links, to the topic of solitude. Now, I doubt I'll get to it. While I've been pondering this, I've run across a striking number of bloggers who allude to the role that solitude plays in their writing lives... sometimes in passing, sometimes at greater length. In uncharacteristic style, I failed to bookmark those sites for my potential 'magnum opus' on the topic. And this I regret.

So, if you are one of those posters who has written or has thoughts on this, there seems to be a goodly number of ears out there who share your perceptions and would love to hear your expression of the double-edged sword of solitude. Please do let us hear from you with a snippet from or link to your thoughts.

I've just spent the most 'alone' year of my life. The second place winner in this category was 1997... the year I moved back here to southwest Virginia to start the little PT clinic in Floyd, while Ann remained in Carolina to become Dr. Ann. I lived alone (well, there was the cat) in a small cabin on the perpetually foggy edge of the Blue Ridge. Yes, I was in the presence of people at work, but even that was a kind of isolation; patients do not, can not fulfill the same role of personal interchange as friends, or even neighbors. There is a professional detachment and separation that necessarily must stand between therapist and patient, and I struggled to hide my aloneness from my patients that year. Had I not been one who is innately tolerant of his own company, that year would have been a sentence to solitary confinement. It was indeed punishment at times; but I found I coped with alone-ness better than I might have thought. Even thrived in it at times. I could live reasonably contentedly, if I must, shrouded in the fog and my own thoughts with one small cat in my lap.

This year wins the prize as the most alone year of my life: a year in which I have spent five days a week home with myself (well there is the cat, and now Buster). Apart from the nameless drivers of the five vehicles that pass the house each day, I might as well have been on a desert island. There have been moments in the short gray days of winter, when I thought I might go mad. But only moments. Mostly, the time alone, severely alone, has been a blessing... a creative solitude. It has become a part of my life I wouldn't want to give up entirely. I am ready and willing to intersperse alone-ness with contact with people and human activity, and welcome this little job I have now, and a growing number of involvements in things in town and at church. But in all this isolation, I have been much more happy than oppressed. I hear some of you saying the same kind of things. Finding the balance is so important, isn't it?

So. Are you a 'loner'? Would you call yourself 'antisocial' or an 'introvert' because you value your time apart? How does your willing detachment from the noise of life influence your writing, your creativity, and 'recharging your batteries'? Have you found that balance?

Today, on the other hand, there will be Buster, and the cat, and the wife sharing my bubble of existance. It is dreary and drippy outside, and I hear the pleasant white noise of the baking of cookies coming from the kitchen. To everything there is a season, and today it's good to have another soul sharing my personal space. I'll ponder about solitude another time. Now, I think I'll have a breakfast cookie!

Forty Miles of Elbow Room

How about 2 square feet of elbow room. This is what I have, in total, to actually use on my genuine yard-sale wood-simulated particle-board desktop. Of course some real estate is taken up necessarily with speakers, telephone, cup with pens and pencils, wooden stacking trays topped with gooseneck desk lamp, ergonomic keyboard, pine monitor stand. Remaining, I have two square feet of luxurious space to spread out bank statements, CD's to burn, bills to pay, an assortment of statements from investment companies with an update... no, maybe one should call them 'down-dates'... of our most current financial worth(lessness). And then there is the stratum under that. An old National Geographic. A new Photoshop Book ('for digital photographers'... that is way, WAY over my head); somewhere the D-hub with my camera memory card still in it with the picture of the fern; some free offers if you respond by March 31, 2003!; a half dozen business cards from old, majorly old, friends encountered at a recent wedding in the town we lived in back during the Cretaceous, several of them I actually emailed, none of them replying, which alas, is usual and customary amongst our particular flavor of old friend); and down their against bedrock of simulated mahogany, a not-so-fine layer of Goose Creek road dust and various pollens, in patches undisturbed in the course of living memory, which by the way, is a resource more finite and shrinking than desktop space. On top of all of the various sediments, like the finale in a vaudeville balancing act, I have just now placed one dish with toast and foxgrape jelly, one tupperware bowl with sliced strawberries, and an insulated mug of Chocolate-flavored Ovaltine, the drink of choice for Captain Midnight, who a mere 50 years ago sent me the Fantastic Decoder Ring along with a certificate of authenticity. It's down under the National Geographic. Maybe.

Can you tell? I'm killing some time offline, waiting for Ann to call me back. Does she indeed have a paycheck being auto-deposited in the bank tomorrow? Or will our mortgage check richochet like a Roy Rogers silver bullet off a Colorado boulder on June 01?

And there lies Buster behind me at the top of the step (banished forever from the newly-carpeted room where the computer lives). Slobbering expectantly. He could care less about our friends, our bank accounts, our cluttered lives, or our memories. As long as he gets the tiny dry corners from my two pieces of toast, life is as it should be. Give him this day his daily bread.

Hmmm. Maybe he's on to something.

Nature's Finery

Marginal Woodfern, late afternoon in late May, after rain

Keep your umbrellas handy.

We're brainstorming.

If you're following along here, you know that there is movement afoot to create a site whose content will be different from any you've visited before. Posts and topics in this yet-to-be-formed portal will be 'about place'. Here are some of the "posts about place" categories that have been included in our list as we think more about the kinds of subject matter that might fit into this genre, this community. Thanks to the capable proprietess of Cassandra Pages for getting this list started. We're open to further suggestions.

• Rural


• City


• International/Expatriates


• Writing Between Cultures


• "Place" and Technology


• Place and Spirit


• Theology of Place


• Nature


• Ecology


• Place and the Future


• Gardening


• Architecture and Landscape Design


• Travelogue


• Urban Culture

Dare ya. One Word. Go.

Take the One Word Challenge. Humbling.

SPRING. A 60 second essay by Freddie First, who'd like you to believe he is in the third grade, Minnie Holman School, Birmingham, AL.

Spring is almost over. It has set the stage for the long torpid days of summer. Spring is a good bye and a hello. I will miss it. Summer is oppressive as spring is liberating. Spring is a time of birth, summer of sweat.

But some 60-second essays warrant more humility that others. Do. Let us see your results. I showed you mine, now show us yours. (Gee I hope I don't get any lascivious Google visits out of that sentence!)

A Peony By Any Other Name

They are blooming now outside our kitchen window. Seems they are kitchen-window sorts of plants, here in the country.

Are they PEE onnies, or pe OHH nies? The camp is divided. You must chose one from your local vernacular. I don't have any money riding on either pronunciation but was curious about regionalisms that might exist.

Abort Comment! Abort!

I just want to say this: every one of you readers whose blogs I've never left a comment on, yes I have too. Well, I've most certainly started a comment on your weblog. And one time in 15, I've actually posted it; and then, probably immediately regreted it. I don't know. There is a certain dis-ease when I am faced with an empty comment box. Oh my gosh, here I am in the spotlight, poised to make a pithy comment about someone's well worded and tightly reasoned post. Here are all these other intelligent reply-ers that obviously know this blogger way better than I do, know the subject way better than I do, have those huge vocabularies that come from the real world out there, where I don't live. Nah. That first sentence you wrote there, Fred, is really lame. She's certain to take your attempt at humor as insensitivity. He'll think your comment comes across as superior; or stupid. Abort! Abort!

With this fact in hand, my statisticians have projected that, at this one to 15 ratio for sent-to-aborted comments, when I get one comment on a given day, another 14 of you have almost written a comment on Fragments. The same, I'm sure, is true for the other weblogs you browse. And you feel as bad about this as I do, bless your little heart, don't ya? I see those hands. I feel those good intentions, brothers and sisters. You're hereby forgiven of your indecision and your failure to reach out and touch a fellow blogger. (And no, this is not begging for comments here; you folks are all good lookin' and above average.)

Be free of your oppression and guilt! Send those jettisoned comments to your daily blog-reads. Send them, dear hearts. They may tend toward the haughty, the stupid or the silly end of the spectrum, like mine. (Nah. Frankly, I think I've pretty well cornered the market on comment ineptitude.) Or your 'serious' comment may make your reader spew coffee all over his or her new flatscreen monitor. Even so, if you'll lower your comment-writing standards, I'll do the same, and damn the torpedos, off go the comments. And let the commentee beware!

They're Coming to Take You Away...

Hoho. HeeHee. The ants, that is. This baby wasn't aggravating them with a stick. And the ants came marching, one by one. Thanks oh so much, Chris, for sharing this comforting piece of entomology gone to the Dark Side.

Coming next: The Attack of the Killer Ladybugs!

Free Speech and Foghorns

A good overview of the Chris Hedges debacle at Rockford College. And a transcript of his speech from the Rockford Register, interspersed with boos, foghorns and other civilized forms of dialogue.

I'll not pretend to agree with each point the man was making. But at your college commencement, would you have booed? Is this okay in the New American Century?

These Were the Best of Times....

The sun is just now coming over the ridge, and every ray that finds its way through the tangle of trunks and branches cuts straight to pasture, garden, the roofs of house and barn. Steam is rising like last night's sleep, like incense made by and returning back to God in heaven. And all is right with the world. Or so it should be.

Instead, Buster and I are dealing with the indignities of age, victims man and beast of failed warranties on our chassis and suspension systems, moving in slow groaning motion, the blind leading the blind. His problem started last fall, and we have no other explanation than multiple-joint arthralgia resulting from tick-borne disease... possibly Rocky Mt. Spotted Fever. This morning, and for most of the last week, he is barely able to get up, in considerable pain, and only walks as far as necessary to lift his leg feebly and come straight back inside to collapse on his dog bed. And poor pup, he's just past four years old, too soon to act like his master who's put in the real mileage to warrant the groans and crepitous joints.

I'd like to think that I feel like I've been kicked by a horse because I had been kicked by a horse; or fallen over the handlebars of my mountain bike on the Rock Castle trail; or had a hard collision with my partner in a round of racquetball doubles at the club; or maybe fallen out of a tree rescuing a stranded raccoon cub. Nope. I cannot give a cause. I can't put a diagnosis on my condition other than 'undefined myalgia'... mid-back muscle pain. Maybe I can blame the pain on planting a dozen tomato plants, or holding an odd lower thoracic configuration while reaching in the fridge for the mayonaisse; or maybe I sneezed wrong. I'm not so bad off that I can't do for myself, which is good, since I must do for myself with Ann away at work all day. Wasn't so sure, in the wee hours, if I was going to be able to attain the vertical this morning or not. So it could be worse.

Still, me and Buster are self-pitiful, cut off in our prime by the fickle finger of entropic fate, not able to take advantage of this perfectly beautiful, never-before-used spring day. And tomorrow. Oh boy. How will I get 90 pounds of dog into and out of the car to the vet to see if we can come to some decisions either to allow a future lifetime of misery for him, or the agonizingly woeful alternative. Sometimes, I don't much care for the choices, and yet you must chose. Doing nothing is also an answer.

And yes, I'll have some cheese with my whine. And maybe I'd like one of these. Good Fairy? Are you listening?

Cell Phonophobia

I was browsing around, looking to see if there might be some way to use our 300 free long distance minutes (Verizon) from down here in the reception-free zone of our little canyon. Do internal or external antennas work?

Ran across this FAQ re Cellular Phone Antennas (Mobile Phone Base Stations) and Human Health and (especially in light of a conversation yesterday with a physician friend who leans toward the 'yes they may be dangerous' point of view) thought this might we worth posting. Your thoughts?

Lessons in Stone

Found. Journal entry September 1976 (revisited and rewritten through the filter of memory in May 2003). After our Sipsey trip, Steve left for Edinburgh and the next year for Aukland for more post-doc work. I visited him in New York in 1978 for a hike into the Adirondacks, then lost touch with him. I located Steve by email recently-- married, two kids, still involved in his life's work in research of neurophysiology of human disease. We said everything we had to say to each other after decades of growing apart, and I guess that's that. I wonder if he remembers this trip from long ago in some deep place in the archives of his life, as I do. I'd like to think so.

Steve would leave soon for at least a year of study abroad. This was our Great Hello to the wonders of nature, and a rather significant goodbye, not knowing when or if our paths would ever cross again. Before us, three uncharted days in a hauntingly beautiful part of the Bankhead National Forest of north Alabama. We had stopped to eat our lunch of French bread and cheese. We stopped because an enormous square moss-covered boulder overlooking the Sipsey River insisted that we share its shade, and its view of the deep pool at its feet, full of tiny shimmering fish. Three or four miles from the nearest road, we might as well have been in the rainforest of Brazil. This wilderness of branching sandstone canyons and grottoes seemed far more tropical than anything one would expect no further south than northern Alabama. The humidity alone made one imagine equatorial jungle. We watched expectantly for anaconda.

We said little to each other, sitting in reverential silence, taking in the dappled light that undulated through the dense canopy after a brief shower, shafts of light falling on the moving stream of clear emerald water. Soon, and as if the scales had suddenly fallen from my eyes, I was able to see past the reflecting surface of the little river, deep down almost to the sandy bottom of the river. There, a dozen identical finger-sized fish pointed the way upstream, gliding and swaying side to side, but never moving forward, were never swept backward, never rested from their efforts against the current.

My friend saw them, too. At length I remarked to Steve, "You know, those fish must expend an enormous amount of energy swimming against the current, all day every day, just to avoid being swept to the sea".

He replied matter-of-factly, "We all do, Fred, we all do".

The tepid water of the creek was our trail, and we waded into wilderness against the August heat of Alabama. The shallow river cooled our legs as we moved further and further away from the nearest marked trail or road. The humidity was palpable. From time to time, we would soak our bandanas in the stream before putting them back around neck or forehead. Stopping on a sandy island to get our bearings, Steve's face was soon buried in the map, intently following the contour lines up one thin ravine to its source, looking for the perfect place to pitch our tents for the night, and soon, by mid-afternoon if possible, so we could enjoy the being there as much as the getting there. I looked up just as a hummingbird positioned itself motionless an inch from Steve's ear, attracted, we later assumed, by his red bandana. I warned him not to move; he froze. Steve was relieved when he found the threat I warned of was nothing more than being ear-pollinated by a long-beaked bird! It stayed just so, long enough for me to get a picture. I have lost the picture, but kept the memory perfectly, hovering in time.

By the middle of the afternoon, we had discovered one particularly splendid blind-ended canyon typical of the Sipsey area, carved by a small tributary of Thompson Creek. The small side-stream plunged over the rim of the ledge above, splashing into a pool of jagged rocks that were so long in place, they were swathed in thick moss and tall arching ferns. Trees grew atop them, roots wrapping round like tentacles of jellyfish, to find the forest floor. The sound of water echoed and hissed like a seashell held to the ear, reverberating in this conch of stone. Here we would stay the night. Nestled back under the broad high dome of ancient rock, we spread our gear on a bed of dry leaves that had drifted into the hollow of rock the previous fall. And then, we had the rest of the afternoon to slow down and absorb the wonder of the place, to let it seep into our bones, and let go the hectic rhythms of the city and highway.

We made ourselves comfortable, stretching out to rest under the ledge of rock frozen in place for millenia, like a breaking wave, 40 feet overhead. Our 'roof' extended out beyond us in a towering brow, toward the nameless stream in the V-shaped bottom of the narrow valley. Tall trees, especially Cucumber Magnolias and massive Tulip Poplars, competed with each other to gain the most benefit of sunlight, lifting their topmost branches above the rim of this hidden green, wet, shadow-filled cove. I have seldom felt such serenity as in this timeless place. The massive unmoving stone whispered to us of permanence, changeless stability, security. I put this into words as best I could, sharing them with Steve. Then we were quiet again for perhaps an hour, lost in our own thoughts.

As we lay there on top of our sleeping bags, hands clasped contentedly behind our heads, I felt a small mote of something fall on my face. Soon, Steve did too. Then a few more specks, and we both realized in the same instant what was happening, and together saw the irony of it. These specks of sand had been falling in just this way, relentless over eons, like ticks from a great granular clock of massive sandstone. With each tick, tock, grain and speck, the great rock diminished. On this particular day, two human minds were there to comprehend it.

The very substance of the sanctuary of stone around us that had spoken to us of permanence-- fixed and immutable features on our map-- was speck upon grain, yielding to forces tearing matter apart, marking time, surrendering to the pull of gravity. The very mountain was moving each moment to the sea. Those tiny motes in our eyes would join the fish we had watched earlier in the day, holding their places in the stream. Pebble and sand would then move with inexorable slowness into larger and stronger streams, at last to find rest in the Gulf. This end, too, suggests the false certainty of a final end. Sand specks will become stone, stones compacted will be lifted up into mountains yet once more, and grains will fall, one by one, and wash away, and live again in mountains.

God's Grandeur

God's Grandeur
Gerald Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Help Wanted

It's a sleepy, soggy Saturday and already I've been immersed in the wiki.

Yes, I know it sounds like the name of a character from Star Wars. I am quick to confess I'm not at the leading edge of technology here in the backwaters of rural Virginia, and wikis were new to me. Now they seem the perfect tool to use as we (a small group of 'place bloggers') collaborate to hopefully create a place where this kind of blog post is the center focus. A pundit-free zone. Take a look at wikis if you have need for a 'chalkboard' to streamline discussions in your business, family, special-interest group. They do seem a bit arcane until you get some content going, then it all makes sense, and the text language is very simple.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: I am recruiting some reader help here (on a Saturday!? Yeah, right!) But if you have ideas, please comment. I am wondering (for the sake of telling others what we're doing) what constitutes a blog post that could be said to be 'about place'? I have started a list on the wiki, drawn from a broad summary of the types of posts on Fragments that I would say are 'from or about place'. Can you offer other suggestions, perhaps from your own writing, of general subjects and perspectives that might be described as 'place-related'? Here are some of mine...

• Nature/natural history: can include mere observations but better than that, observations that promote understanding or reflect relationships with non-human species and habitats.
• Landscapes: descriptive/immersive narrative of the landform that surrounds you (or in your travels but more than a travelog of I went here, there, etc). Paint word pictures so those from other types of country can be vicariously in your woods, prairie, beach, mountaintop, etc).
• Human-nature interaction: Tell how your activities or those of your community impact the living systems for good or ill.
• Local history of place: Explore how your life is just so because of the history of where you live, the people that lived there and farmed fields, built the house, created community...
• Personal space in place: Reflections of one life (yours) passing through and being changed by place (weather, seasons, birth-death, aging, personal growth). Journaling in the context of the 'where'.

Now: Your turn. Don't be shy. Help guide us toward a better understanding of what this growing blog-habitat is all about. Then (hopefully soon) we will need you to help us by contributing appropriate posts from your weblog, and we'll ask you to tell others who might have an interest so the community can grow. This is exciting for me, after a year of being the Strange Farmer of Erewhon, putting my silly trinkets out there for passers-by. Lo and behold, there are other kindred Farmers out there, thought perhaps not quite as strange as this one. And I think our collective 'produce' will be worth coming for. Soon and very soon.

What are Entomologists Made of?

Snakes and snails and puppydog tails. Sugar and spice and everything nice. These are the things we're made of, depending on wether we got one or two doses of the X chromosome. Some would argue about those exact ingredients, but no matter what you think we're made of, a certain portion of the recipe, I am convinced, is pre-mixed at birth and influences... without rigidly determining... our propensities throughout life. We've been talking here off and on about appreciation of 'nature' and I suggest that perhaps we come into this world hardwired in some degree of attraction to or repulsion from the world of snakes and snails.

I was fascinated with insects from very early in life. Their tininess and intricacy and beauty amazed me. I am told (as one of those oft-repeated family traditional stories) about the time I hollered from the tiny back yard for my mother to come see! come see! something on the trunk of a tree.

"Look mommy! A pillowcase!"

It took me several years to sort out some word pairs. Frog - turtle. BandAid - rubber band. Pillowcase - caterpillar. But the point is, turning rocks in the back yard looking for 'things' is one of my first memories of excitement and adventure and wonder. And I guess it never left me. Twenty years later, I was deciding what to do for graduate school, and I really wanted to be an bugologist.

The undergrad entomology class (at Auburn) was one of my first field-intensive classes, and I had a ball making my required insect collection. Collecting amounted to such onerous activities as playing tennis on a muggy Alabama night. When a nighthawk or bat would knock down a perfectly good Giant Water Bug, Hawkwing Moth, or Rhinocerus Beetle (see picture) that swarmed in a cloud around the bright lights on the court, I'd call a brief halt in the game to put the 'windfall' in my kill jar and tally up a few more specimens of the 125 we had to have in our collection by the end of the term. And of course, there was the sweep-net method, also very productive: take a butterfly net and just sweep it back and forth across a field of Queen Annes Lace and Black Eyed Susans... and find in the small end of the net a writhing mass of Leafhoppers and Assasin Bugs and Tumbling Flower Beetles.

There at the Married Students Village where we lived, the early morning routine that semester found me plucking Long Horned Woodboring Beetles and Click Beetles from under the neighbors' front porch lights. Like most biologists, I was considered quite mad, of course. But eventually, I was getting calls from the folks over in C Building to come get some odd beetle or moth. I think they thought I was eating them. Nevertheless...

I told my friends I was considering Entomology for my masters degree. They said, in their helpful and supportive way, that that was a lot of trouble to go through to be able to wear that neat monogrammed shirt and Cap that said "ORKIN". Yeah, right. Worse than that, I learned that a good bit of the financial support for entomological research was coming at the time from the likes of Monsanto and other producers of agricultural insecticides (and this shortly after the revelations of Silent Spring). I was more interested in biological controls, but it was an idea whose time had not yet come, and the $$$ for research was controlled by the fox who guarded the hen house. So I collected toads in the rain instead. But that's another story.

Well! Whaddaya know! Once again, the bush has been beaten all around in my usual long-winded way, just to suggest that the early appreciation of insects may be a way to encourage a greater awareness of nature's wonders in your kids. You might learn something in the process, too! You and little PuppyDog Tails or Sugar'nSpice might want to start by going to the Insect Company and have a look around. There are some wonderful pictures of all sorts of insects, and a page that tells how to collect and prepare them properly.

And NO. You do NOT have to know any scientific names. I have lowered my requirements (let's say I've raised the bar) for Fragments readership, and Wiggly Black Bug will be acceptable. You will, however, get extra credit if you make a stab at a common name. And be advised: there is no currently known insect called a Pillowcase.

I Think That I Shall Never See...

Tulip Poplar flower, 21 May 2003

If you know no other tree's scientific name, learn this one for the Tulip "Poplar"...

Come on. Say it out loud. You know you want to. Isn't that a wonderful latin nugget? Sounds like a Druid incantation or an ominous secret phrase known only to Frodo and Samwise. For some reason, though, I always want to say it out the cigarless side of my mouth like a wise-crack from W. C. Fields. But that's just me.

Tulip poplar is by far the dominant tree species on our place. There are specimens almost this size. It is a comfort just to stand with my back against one of these magnificent monoliths in it's green shade, looking up thirty feet to its first branches with the distinctive leaves and flowers. They always remind me of trees drawn by children... tall linear trunks with a scribbled looking crown.

The biggest Tulip Poplar I've seen, and I think maybe the world record for the species is in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in North Carolina. Three adults can't wrap their arms around it; you have to call in a medium-sized six-year-old to complete the circle. Although the wood is a soft hardwood, they can live for up to 300 years. The Tulip Poplar isn't really a poplar tree. It is actually a member of the magnolia family. It's the state tree of Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. And that's all I got to say 'bout that.

Monkey Puzzle

As the result of an experiment in which Rhesus monkeys were allowed free access to computer keyboards, Fragments is listed on a short list of generic WEBLOGS on What's New at Yahoo for Tuesday, 20 May, explaining why my visits leapt up into the double digits briefly.

I will accept sheer random chance as the compliment I'm sure those pudgy little monkey fingers intended it to be. Come back soon, fellas, and we'll pick nits at my place. Maybe have a banana daiquiri on the upstairs porch. I owe ya.

Our Chickens Come Home to Roost

Our 24-year-old peripatetic son was home for a short visit this past week. My daughter and granddaughter were with us earlier that same week. It's great having a houseful of 'children' again, but it always seems a bit like victims returning to the scene of the crime with an axe to grind with the parental criminals. They eventually get around to rubbing our aging noses in past offenses and misdemeanors, not quite willing to let us or themselves forget.

Nate had time while he was here to browse some of the Fragments archives he doesn't have access to where he lives. He ran across a fairly recent post that I called "Urban Legends of Childhood", about things kids hear and about 'facts' that kids learn from mind-controlling parents (is there another kind?) and he reminded me of this little incident, a Rural Legend of sorts in our family.

We had just moved from town to 'the farm' in a part of southwest Virginia not very far from here, and were enjoying a beautiful early summer day on the deck. Nathan was not quite three years old, and this was one of the first days of unrestrained barefoot frolic in his new country back yard. Heck, there was 22 acres of back yard! He chased the cats under the porch, climbed into and through the big boxwood that grew by the driveway, and hunted in the clover for bumblebees, which he would pet with his chubby little finger. "They won't hurt me. They're my friends" he would say, and he never got stung.

"Nathan!" I called, and he came running on his stumpy little legs. "Did you know that if you flap your arms up and down, up and down, really really fast, you can fly?!"

His eyes went wide as silver dollars and he leapt off the two steps from the deck and commenced to become airborne. Without a trace of doubt as we watched amazed from our lawnchairs, his legs and arms churned the air as he ran back and forth under the old apple tree. "Faster! FASTER!" we exhorted. Back and forth he went. Finally, he collapsed with his wings and landing gear totally exhausted. Onlookers at the airport there were quick to praise him. "You darn near made it, boy. I thought you were about to head up over the barn there for a minute!"

He never fails to remind me of this. And I don't know exactly how guilty he wants me to feel about telling him this parental fairy tale, this little bit of trickery and magic long ago. I do know that for an instant, he knew he could fly. And somehow, I don't think that hope every quite left him. Both of our children have grown wings, metaphorically, and have taken great leaps into the unknown, and staid aloft in most graceful flight. And I wonder, when their time comes, and their stocky little 3-year-old runs barefoot in the yard on a summer day... will they tell her she can fly? I hope so.

Heads-up, bloggeroos and bloggerettes.

"Place bloggers" have their own special spot this week on Carnival of the Vanities over at Cut on the Bias. Susanna was kind enough to give us a little section to ourselves, and EIGHT of us have submitted posts that either discuss or give examples of "writing of or about place". Check it out, along with the usual wide variety of serious-to-silly offerings from familiar blogging personalities.

This group-blog happened as a result of some conversation that's been going on twixt a half-dozen of us. Could be that in weeks to come, there will be a place where this little niche of the blogosphere can grow in scope and sense of community. It's not ALL about politics, you know! Stay tuned!

Familiarity Breeds Respect

Spicebush Swallowtail, and Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterflies on Butterfly Bush

Yes, I know the saying says otherwise. And I have known people, jobs and towns where, the more I learned about them.... well, we do sometimes come to despise that which has become too comfortable, too familiar. But maybe it is more often true in my experience that 'familiarity breeds respect', and this has entered my thoughts this week as I have pondered how answer a sincere question posed to me by a regular Fragments reader. Jim wonders how necessary it is to have a scientific knowledge of the details of nature in order to enjoy it. On the one hand, he says that he is enriched in some sense when I describe a particular species of wildflower or butterfly using a common or scientific name to distinguish it from it's relatives. At the same time, he wonders how necessary the jargon of science is to enjoying a day in the woods. Can one not just see a flower as 'small, yellow and pretty' without needing to know any more about it than that?

Yes, I would say that the celebration and enjoyment of nature and place can be generic, painted with a broad brush and experienced at the level of merely being there-- in the woods among trees and flowers and birds, and no names needed. The poetry and prose of nature was expressed long before Mr. Linneaus helped us see both the similarities and the differences among the creatures of sea and field and forest and gave them Latin names. Many of us seem to have become attracted to the nature-world when very young, perhaps even before having any words at all to describe it. In my own case, up to my junior year in college (when classes finally became 'field-oriented') I loved the natural world, but all snakes were unknown and therefore dangerous and plants were pretty much all the same. My ignorance of nomenclature did not make me love being outdoors any less. But I certainly understood the intricacies of nature much less then when I lacked names for things. As a (former) teacher, I understand the grievous task of learning them, and have had to do my share of convincing students of the merits of knowing at least some creatures by their names.

There is more to nomenclature than assigning a common name, or Latin genus and species name to things, Jim. If I tell you that I have been watching a Monarch butterfly (and not just a 'orangish butterfly'), you may know immediately about it's preference for milkweed, about how this diet (and the creature's color and pattern) effects its defenses against predators, and you know about its amazing migration across the country each fall. All that you know because the name distinguishes this orange and black butterfly from other similar creatures. The name places the thing in a larger context. Knowing the name confers relationship, weaving that organism into the fabric of the bigger scheme of things just by knowing 'who' it is. And of course, it is only by virtue of the fact that organisms have fixed and universally agreed-upon scientific names that lets me know instantly, when a reader from California tells me she finds Dryopteris marginalis in her back yard, it is the same Marginal Wood Fern that grows right here in our valley. The name becomes a common language that gives me a connection to others and their places far away. On the other hand, for her to tell me simply "I have ferns here" would do little to unite my world with hers.

Familiarity breeds respect, and in a sense, it creates friends of nameless birds, trees, flowers or insects. A friend is not a generic person but a person you recognize as unique, you know their particular history, their preferences and the relationships they have with other friends and their community. To me, plants and animals that have names are like old friends. I know that may sound rather strange. But each spring, I know when and where to look for the particular 'little yellow flower' called "Perfoliate Bellwort". And when I hear the wheezy sound of the Black and White Warbler in mid-May, I pretty well know where in the tree he will be calling from and where he is going when he leaves here later in the spring. To learn the name of a creature confers the opportunity to comprehend something of the 'natural history' of it. It doesn't exist alone but lives in an 'oikos' or 'household' of nature, and it is from this Greek root that we get the word 'ecology'... the integrative understanding of interrelationships that form the remarkable tapestry of the natural world. The patterns therein are more easily overlooked when we don't have 'friends' among the nameless crowd of 'pretty yellow flowers'. And they (or their habitats) are at greater risk from any number of threats if we think of all of them as interchangeable and coequal.

In the yarns and ramblings and images in this weblog, I describe a personal ecology of relationship with place. I fumble with words in my effort to understand the ways I fit into this peculiar time and place, this niche. I can't tell my story fully apart from these other fellow creatures and the physical geography of the space around me. The passing of the seasons in this valley is measured by the rhythms and cycles of particular and known fellow creatures that live for a time in our garden, down the valley, on our ridge, in the creeks. My 'old friends' help me better understand my own inner ecology in this patch of cove hardwood forest in the Southern Appalachians. Like the very hills themselves, they are part of a design and purpose that speaks to me of things eternal, not things to be worshipped in themselves, but pointing me towards That One. The words in Fragments are both about this place, and about my living immersed in its mysteries and pleasures, among the myriad creatures great and small. I could live happily here without names for things and would continue to write of mere birds and bugs and flowers with joy and wonder. But for me, having names for living things enriches my understanding of them and of my own place in this cathedral made without hands.

All's Fair: In Love and Gardening

That does it. I went out between showers yesterday to admire my new rows of submerged seeds planted a few days ago. The garden is covered in deer hoof prints sunk way deep in the soft soil, passing right through my new plantings! We are now on CODE BROWN: Enemy circumvents protective measures, threatens Silver Queen! Countervailiing measures have been instituted as follows:

1) Buster and I are saving up our deer deterrent for thrice-daily application around the perimeter of the gardening compound. NOTE: be sure and turn off the electric fence before application.

2) Biological weapons have become an acceptable measure at this code level. To execute, cut 2" x 5" strips of an old aluminum pie plate. Bend into an "S" shape. Top of the "S" is secured to the top wire of the electric fence (again: Turn OFF before implementing this measure!) and the bottom of the "S" is molded into a little spoon shape. Fill the spoon with peanut butter and turn the fence back on. Yum! Peanut Butter! Smell it, Bambi? Hmmmmm!

Gardening Hopefully

Last year for the first time in living memory, and by that I mean the memory of the oldest residents living in our area... 90 years old and better... our creek-- the one that runs between the barn and the garden-- dried up. Completely. One August morning there were a few thin pools of lethargic anoxic little fish, and by that afternoon, they were belly to the sky, drying in the searing sun. The silence was like a death, the creekbed a lifeless trench without flow or sound or hope. It was not a good gardening year.

Early in the season that started with a spring so dry the blackberries barely set flowers and made only dry little knots for fruit, there had at least been enough water in the creek that I was able to pull a few gallons a minute from a 6" deep pool near the barn and pump it across the road in a garden hose to the garden. Anticipating the need to irrigate, I rigged up the small pump with a tractor battery to fill my rows of beans and corn with creek water two or three times a week until the rains would come again. Surely they would come. I dug long trenches with my hoe, and the seeds went down in the bottom of the furrow. After the plants were established, I could set the hose in one end of a trench and pull water out of the creek until each trench was full before moving to the next. It was a pretty good system. Until the source went dry. The garden withered and died by mid August, and that was that.

Last week I put in Buttercrunch and Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce, Spinach, Early Kale, Swiss Chard and the first patch of Silver Queen corn. I got so excited about getting something in the ground that I forgot to plant the garden in trenches... the method that had worked so well-- for a while-- during our dry summer last year. Forgetting to trench, it turns out, might be just fine. So far, it has been as wet this year as it was dry last. We've had frog-choking rains almost every day here lately, including today. I just looked out at the garden to see the 'land of a thousand lakes' as that area must appear from the air: every footprint that I left with last week's tilling is now a miniature glacial lake full of water. Had I planted in trenches, the long sunken rows would be miniature inland canals full to their banks, and the seeds at the bottom would surely rot during these relentless cold rainy days.

Just shows to go ya. No matter what you do in trying to outsmart the gardening gods, you and your vegetables are totally subject to the vagaries of mindless air masses that sometimes favor, sometimes punish. The rain falls and the wilting sun beams on the godly and the ungodly alike. I understand that 'fusarium resistant', 'slow-bolt', 'early bearing', 'long-standing', 'high yielding'... are all merely happy fortune cookie futures from the backs of the seductive seed packets. Your mileage may vary. And yet, I can already see this year's garden in my hopes, as it might grow to be. I stand here watching my seeds deluged by the floods of late May, prepared for those thrills and agonies that will come, knowing that when it comes right down to it, chance is likely to trump a gardener's best design.

When all is said and done, some of the fruits of our labor will end up in colorful rows on our cellar shelves in the Fall, Mason jars bearing testimony to this gardening year's good luck and God's blessing, a dash of chance and a pinch of miracle, and enough but not too much rain.

First Blogumentary

The Blogging World seems to be having some growing pains, undergoing a sub-adult introspection of what it wants to be when it grows up. Maybe there is now enough interblog experience and a critical mass of blogger-neurons to begin to think collectively about where we and the medium goes from here. I think the process is good... to be proactive and inward-thinking without being self-absorbed and too full of ourselves that we go off in our own separate idiosyncratic directions entirely. Chuck Olsen is preparing his magnum opus... the Blogumentary... a documentary about blogging and bloggers, with some early installments already in place. (Bummer. Low bandwidth and a broken QuickTime here at Fragments so I'll send you there to come back with a report.) Here's part of his introduction...

Being a blogger has made me more observant and more informed. More than that, I feel connected and as though I'm tapped into something. I peer directly into others personal lives, sometimes seeing myself reflected and resonating with that connection. Or, I see what it's like to live in another's shoes: a homeless guy in Nashville, a college girl in Canada, a Peace Corps recruit or... Wil Wheaton. I begin to post something and stop myself - is this too personal? Who's going to see this? I learn what's going on in the world and argue with people - we are renegade microjournalists improvising and jousting, and sometimes creating a clamour the world can't ignore. (See: Trent Lott.)

I am an evangelist about encouraging everyone to be a mediamaker. When you make your own media, (1) You bypass the filters of the corporate-owned mainstream media machine. (2) You become more aware, more observant, more opinionated. You realize what your interests are, you think harder, you delve deeper.

To me, blogs are the next stage of... something. The digital video revolution is making everyone into a filmmaker and documentarian, and blogs are making everyone into a journalist, pundit or memoirist. Video blogs are the exciting mixture of the two. Our culture is capturing itself at an unprecedented level. How is this changing me, how is this changing us? Is it too much - should we stop capturing, and just be? I want to know, and I hope you do, too. -- Chuck Olsen

What other party?

Admit it. It's unpleasant to think about. But your children could be democrats. It's not too late. Garrison Keillor has come around, your precious children could too. It's the post-political age and We're all Republicans now. To resist is futile. Kids basically ARE Republicans. Get over it. Be on the winning side. Convert today.

Requires RealAudio

To See the World

One day last week, late in the afternoon well after time for the mailman to come by in his muddy jeep, I happened to look out and see that there was a plastic bag hanging heavily on the mailbox. We had had another visitation by the National Geographic Fairy; I knew this before lifting the rain-wet package from the side of the big green mailbox under the maple tree. Our retired neighbors had left us the package. Must be on their way back to northern Virginia where they live when not staying down the road in the little white house she grew up in. One of 11 children, her aunt lived in the house we now inhabit. The neighbors pretty much stay to themselves, neither one of them well, but they never fail to drop off a goodie package before heading back upstate. And I especially appreciate that, unbidden, they have taken to giving us their National Geographics. I'm saving every one.

I cannot see the familiar yellow border of this venerable magazine without flashbacks to a childhood where 'the Geographic' was the closest thing we had to world adventure that is today satisfied by the Nature/History/Discovery Chanels and the Internet. The need to explore places you will never go. The bizarre and wonderful plants and animals that inhabit the surreal jungles and rainforest on continents that an elementary school mind could not even imagine! Adventures of brave photographers who lived with animals as a way of life, as their job! How could one stand to simply throw an 'old' copy away, since its contents did not become 'used' when its cover date was past. And so most everybody I knew back then had a three or four column stack of National Geographics piled in yellow zigzags in the back corner of the guest bedroom: an archive of mystery and the exotic come to Everyman now living in predictable and tame suburbia.

Georgia could see well enough so that, with her red-tipped white cane, she could get around to her meals and back to her room in the assisted living apartment building where I provided physical therapy. She could see and feel her way with an acceptable level of risk so that she could, and must every day, rain or shine, walk down the quiet side parking lot along the edge of the woods to the cul-de-sac. I would often see her standing there facing the woods that she could not see, staring through her dark glasses intently into memory of forests. She had taught biology in high school starting about the time I was born. Standing there alone, she could smell the earth change through the seasons, feel the wind shift, hear it sigh in tones that told more than a sighted person would know about the size and abundance of leaves in the oak forest next to the home. And mercifully, she knew her birds by their calls.

Her husband, gone now for ten years, had invested in a lifetime subscription to the National Geographic. She got one every month but could not see the glossy pictures or read the words about the world of sharp edges and color. Her world was becoming each day a smaller and smaller dark smudge of light at the end of a long wooden cane. Once a month, I would round the corner and there down the corridor, hung on the doorknob of the therapy room, would be a plastic bag with the most recent issue of National Geographic. It was Georgia's way of passing the world on to those of us who still have time to see.

Intimations of Mortality

Edinburgh Castle, May 14, 2001

Two years ago today, we were on our way home from Ireland (and for too brief a time, Scotland) after visiting our son Nathan (who arrived here on Goose Creek just last night for a short visit). At the time, he was an exchange student from his little college at Maryville, Tennessee to Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Emerald Isle is everything we expected, and we had a wonderful trip. Except...

Before we left for the trip, I had managed to have a little 'episode' with my low back... a recurring aggravation that was more of a nuisance most of the time here around the place. But sitting was the position of least comfort, and we certainly were going to do more than our share of sitting in buses, cabs, trains and planes during the trip. Even so, I'd be okay; just had to stretch a lot, change positions often, avoid too much prolonged sitting.

I don't know. Guess it was the tight little front seat of the cab we took from the motel to the airport the day we left for home. My knees were almost in my face. Whatever the cause, the effect was one massively powerful cramping pain in my right thigh and calf unlike anything I've ever experienced in my life. I tried to carry on the conversation with the cabby while jamming my foot into the floorboard with every ounce of strength I could find to push the pain back. We reached the airport. I passed out from the pain. I could barely stand or walk. This was not good.

And for the next 20 hours, I was forced to sit, with an acute awareness of the exact distribution of my sciatic nerve. No pain meds, no ice. May 16, 2001 was without doubt the longest day of my life. For a week after we returned, I couldn't tolerate sitting behind the wheel to drive. Ann drove me to work (a brand new job, to boot) with me lying full back in the passenger's seat, feeling like a load of lumber in an ambulance. Tests showed nothing (no disc bulge etc). Save some calf weakness, I'm fully recovered now.

I apologize for dragging you along through my anniversary of miseries. But this is one of those Churchill kind of days that 'will live forevah in infamy' and thus is a part of the Fragmented Total Package of life that inhabits these pages. Today I am alive and very well, thank you, and will be rousting young Nate momentarily to press him into farming duties. The boy has a strong and healthy back, and the list is long!

Words About Place

There is an interesting thread developing along the lines of the previous post about Place-oriented Weblogs.

Pica of Feathers of Hope observes that this is more about attitude than location, and an intimacy with one's place can be found even in an urban setting.

Chris Corrigan of Bowen Island Journal describes how an island home influences his sense of place, and points to a Barry Lopez essay on the literature of place.

Lisa of Field Notes describes the tension between the need for freedom in her environment and the need to find solace from it and from community centered in some way by their common connections to place.

And at Cassandra Pages, the author works her thoughts around what 'place' is all about, and I think speaks for many of us, stating that everything she writes is about place, if you see the world through that set of lenses, which she describes.

UPDATE Saturday 17 May 2003...

Chris Corrigan adds to the discussion with another perfect quote from Barry Lopez who suggests that our expression of attachment to and meaning from place may represent a "fundamental defense to human loneliness".

Sainteros wonders about crossing the divide between the ideal of place and its reality, with Goose Creek as an example, he being in a small number of Fragments readers who has stepped through the looking glass of words and been for a time in 'our place'. He wonders if blogs about place can build bridges others can cross, or is the divide too vast for technology to span?

We'd be happy to hear your thoughts. If you have or know someone who has posted related items, please comment, trackback or email to continue this discussion!