Yesterday was one of those “pulled thread” days in which undertaking Task A pulls out Task B which unravels to reveal Task C…

The alarm to drain the water filtration tank popped up, and like most alarms, I snoozed it for almost a week until yesterday. I was going to be string-trimming the remains of the Jonquils along the branch anyway (and the tall grasses down in the wet depression where the temporary stream flows) so might as well open the door to what was a root cellar when we first saw the place and connect the garden hose and open the valve and let iron-tainted rust-colored water flow out of the tank and into the grass of the front yard.

Lo in the darkness, there were the screens that had been moved off the wooden love seat I’d tugged out of the cellar, up and over the rock wall, to put on the back porch for Abby’s friends that came to visit us while she was here two weeks ago. I’d moved the screens in front of the tank, so while I was draining the tank, having put down the string trimmer, I moved the screens out of the way and up onto the back porch.

And of course, I couldn’t have the screens as an unsightly greeting when She got home, so I forgot about the string trimmer, remembered to turn the water off after 10 minutes, and began installing screens. It was just starting to rain.

And thus last night through the screened and open windows, I was able to hear the torrential downpour and know in the wee hours that yesterday’s lettuce and chard seeds that completed the row containing the potatos, the grass seed over the ramped walkway entry into the garden and the buckwheat seeds planted yesterday afternoon as a cover crop to hold the soil over the poorer parts of the garden against erosion were all washing downstream along with more than a few pounds of our topsoil.

So I wished I’d snoozed the drain-the-tank alarm at least one more day. I’d have slept better.

” Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast”

Definition: A ludicrously false statement. Basically it means BS or nonsense.

Analysis: Actually, you probably already know this word by its more common spelling: bunkum.

The origin of this word is fascinating. In 1819, a North Carolina congressman, the Honorable Felix Walker, was giving a rambling speech with little relevance to the current debate. He refused to yield the floor, and claimed that he wasn’t speaking for Congress but instead “for Buncombe” (a county in North Carolina he represented). That’s all it took.

Over time, the spelling changed to “bunkum,” and the meaning strangely changed to be “excellent.” Then it changed back in 1870, when a San Francisco gambler introduced a new game “banco” played with dice that were later found out to be loaded. Sure enough, BUNCO became known to mean swindle or cheat, and bunkum reverted back to its original meaning. (Source)

The word DEBUNK came directly from this: it’s just bunk(um) with the prefix de- (meaning to remove). link thanks to NeatoRama

We lived in NC for seven years, and I heard of this county often, but never made the connection. Don’t you just love how language evolves!?

I wish you could step out onto the front porch with me this morning, that I could send you the sound of the creeks, the soft exchange between a towhee and a distant whippoorwill in the half-light; that you could feel the calmness, silhouettes painted against a dark pewter sky before dawn.

It is too early yet for the smell of pollen from the pasture grasses, but we’ve already had hints of the “mystery perfume” whose source we have yet to identify.

It is for me the most perfect of times, some wildflowers of spring still holding on, the rank overgrowth of summer yet to come. The garden lies fallow and full of promise like this white space before me filling with words never before seen above ground.

I’ll put in some lettuce this morning–a few weeks too late–to join the dozen strawberry plants a friend brought us, and the couple of dozen potato plants that was all we have room for this year.

I tilled the garden yesterday after unfouling the spark plug (thanks to a small-engineer neighbor for the problem-solving) and the term “from scratch” came to mind as I lurched along behind the Honda struggling to make a dent in the poorer soil on the shed end of the garden. Toward the house, a fill of topsoil gives us some depth and that’s where the potatos went. The rest of it will take a couple of years of cover crop, compost and sweat equity to bring to good tilth.

And in this world where almost never do goods come unadulterated with their own costs, my back is not doing very well since unloading a half ton of donkey doo from my truck. A recurrent muscle injury creeps in a day or two after this kind of moderate physical work these days to keep me humble.

There’s a fine line between humble and broken. But I’ve spent a lot of years teaching folks how to cope with physical disability, to adapt and problem solve. So I vow to be both resolute and reasonable and do what I can with the tools and time I have. All a body can do.

And regarding other crops: I sometimes consider an end to this long stream of verbiage and then I run across readers of various of my rambles who give me encouragement–two emails yesterday from Slow Road Home readers and in town, neighbors I’d never met–one who reads the blog and one who reads the Floyd Press columns. Thanks, all.

On mornings like this, the words come easily, and then the quiet moments I am heading toward just now with a third cup of coffee. Come with me. Listen.

Siding is up, doors or on in this picture from a few days back.

And yesterday coming home from work when I drove around the bend, the terra cotta (colored) roof was in place! Pix of the finished construction tomorrow or Thursday perhaps.

Now the real work begins. And the tiller won’t start. Oy. Life goes on.

But of course we already knew that even earlier in the day of the afternoon on which this image (er, these images) were taken. Isn’t it considered good luck if the first thing you see in the morning is a bat in the room fluttering in your somnolent peripheral vision as you’re drinking your first cup of coffee? Said bat disappeared thereafter and could not be found. Read: Ann freaked.

Company (red shirt with two large poodles image foreground) walked in the house to visit yesterday afternoon and immediately the bat greeted her. Ann freaked. Bat cooperated by restricting itself to our bedroom. I returned a moment later, creature in dustpan. “How’d you get it?” she asked. Punnily I answered: “Batted it.” Stunned it with a broom and released it outdoors.

Garden shed roof goes on today, metal terra cotta pre-painted, should match the barn roof you see in the picture above. Spread about half of the donkey poo out of the back of the truck (thanks again, Ron! but oooh my back!) but was not able to crank the tiller to work it into the soil. I’ll make an emergency small engine consult to my neighbor this afternoon and hopefully have it looking like a ready plot by the weekend.

So you can see T-dog has met his match and then some–two 8 year old poodles came to play and they took no crap off the guy-dog. They actually bantered and taunted and chased and played coy and ran in the creek and had a grand time yesterday afternoon when a former co-worker of Ann’s brought Tsuga some playmates. Wore him out!

We stood at the edge of the pasture post-dogromp waiting for what sounded like a small and very slow plane to crest the treetops to the west. It seemed to be taking forever and I finally gave up watching. When I turned around the Goodyear Blimp (throwing its voice as often happens in these hollers) had appeared over the east ridge and quite freaked me out!

The combined image at the top of this post is 1) the blimp at 200mm spliced into 2) the scene at 50mm focal length–otherwise the blimp in the sky would have appeared about the size of one of the dogs on the ground. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

We will resume our usual blather on the other side of this non-emergency transition as we move into our spacious, modern, high-tech revolving glass-enclosed blogging complex overlooking Goose Creek and the Fortress Garden.

This year, the 34th annual Mt Rogers Naturalist Rally happens on May 9-10 and I will go. It will be like going home. But then again, neither I nor the world is the same as it was the first time I gathered with others for the Saturday morning field trips at Konnarock.

It was the spring of 1976 and as a twenty-something new faculty member, I’d successfully petitioned the community college to let me offer a new “plant life” course that I would gladly develop–a class I envisioned as field trip intensive, wild foods and ecology minded, hands-on botany. The class was offered, and students (from local freshmen to retired world travelers) signed up. We began our field excursions right away in a small caravan out to stalk the wild asparagus!

I was told about a new outdoor event in May at Mt. Rogers and was intrigued: a congregation of fellow tree huggers! Ten students went with me; we pitched our tents Friday night after the dinner and speaker and awoke at daylight to a light frost.

Saturday morning, more than 120 participants gathered to be matched with the designated field trip leader of a dozen scheduled events–birds, plants, geology, small mammals, mosses, salamanders and more. But one of the leaders had become ill at the last minute. Could anybody lead a wildflower field trip, the organizers asked from the top of the steps of the old CCC building?

My students volunteered me, and I reluctantly agreed. It was such a rewarding experience, I went back for eleven years after that to lead the same field trip over the same familiar terrain of Grindstone’s nature trail across gentle slopes of rich cove forest–a 3/4 mile loop where year after year I repeated my little speechlets at the same bends of the trail about this fern or lichen or wildflower. I came to know the place by heart.

In 1987 we moved away, and not long after returning to Virginia in 1997, I revisited Grindstone and the Naturalist Rally–a kind of double homecoming. Many of the human faces were the same, save for the passage of time. Some folks in my long absence had never missed a single year. But much about the natural face of the area was not the same, even in the short span of years since ‘76.

The dark visage of the area’s 5000-foot mountain crests (Rogers, Whitetop and Pine) are less dark now than they were then. The evergreens (spruce-fir, white pine and eastern Hemlock) are under siege by adelgids and beetles, the trees’ abilities to resist compromised by acid precipitation and climate change. The summit trails are strewn with unnatural blow-down of dead treetops, open light reaching the mossy forest floor that was for centuries in dark shade all day long.

The birders at Mt. Rogers see a different mix of birds now on their field trip, some species less abundant, others missing entirely, many showing up at odd times as the northern migration season warms earlier than what has long been normal. The accelerating disappearance of tropical forest converted over the past four decades to pasture for beef production and now to biofuel crops spells doom for many once-familiar Virginia summer songbirds that winter in shrinking South American habitat.

And saddest of all for me: on my solo reunion walk around Whispering Waters trail at Grindstone in 1998, some of my old friends–rose twisted stalk, showy orchis, umbrella-leaf, and yellow trillium–were not there where I had always found them all those May field trips before.

I want to stick my finger in the dike, to click my heels and have the natural order right again. Can humankind live in harmony with this world for good? Can we as good stewards keep an eye on the sparrow even while we live off the bounty of our finite home place?

If in the end it turns out that we can successfully be both stewards and consumers of our vanishing natural wealth, that change of heart and habit will come in no small measure from those across the world who live in nature, who are attuned to its nuances and small wonders and who by necessity or choice, immerse themselves in the outdoors–many for the sheer love of it.

So I’ll be pleased to cast my lot again this year with the bird-watching, stream stalking, butterfly-netting, tree-hugging naturalists at Mt. Rogers–a group who, as a whole, are filled with wonder in the out-of-doors. And in wonder, it has been said, is the beginning of wisdom.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States announced the launch of an investigation on ‘Morgellons Disease’ in January 2008 [1], after receiving thousands of complaints from people with this bewildering condition, which it describes as follows [2]: “Persons who suffer from this unexplained skin condition report a range of cutaneous (skin) symptoms including crawling, biting and stinging sensations; granules, threads, fibers, or black speck-like materials on or beneath the skin, and/or skin lesions (e.g., rashes or sores). In addition to skin manifestations, some sufferers also report fatigue, mental confusion, short term memory loss, joint pain, and changes in visions.”

Morgellons Disease first became known in 2001, when Mary Leitao created a web site describing the illness in her young son, which she named after a 17th century medical study in France describing similar symptoms [3]. Until then, people with Morgellons Disease have been diagnosed as cases of “delusional parasitosis”, in which the symptoms are deemed entirely imaginary, and lesions allegedly due to self-inflicted wounds.

Some early evidence (with a very small sample size at this point) suggests a bacterial agent associated with Morgellons–all the more significant in that this particular bacterium (Agrobacterium) is everywhere, has the ability to transfer some of its genetic material into organisms other than fellow bacterial types, AND that this organism is an agent in genetically modifying plant crops. (Are you hearing the intro theme to X-files yet?) And some fringe groups (natch) are shouting ET GO HOME!

I’ve followed this for more than six months and it only gets more interesting. If you haven’t heard about this previously unknown and very rare condition, my guess is that like WNS in bats over the past six months, the topic will snowball as CDC either substantiates or refutes the legitimacy of this “new disease”. Wikipedia has a good set of resource links of you’re interested and here’s a link to Google News archives for 2008 on the topic to date.

That’s all I’ve got of the princess visit from almost a week ago–can it be?–though the house still bears signs of their passage. I just stepped on a plastic bubble-wand in my bare feet. And only yesterday I took the high chair back to the nice folks at Haven’s Chapel that loaned it to us at the 11th hour before Taryn needed it.

And now they’re more than 1000 miles way for another six months, a year, we don’t really know when we’ll see them again–when Taryn will have teeth and Abby be another couple of inches taller.

Frankly, I was not surprised having heard of the human swarm that the Myrtle Beach are has become. Still, seeing it for ourselves about a month ago was a shock. The beauty and serenity of Brookgreen Gardens and the many impressive sculptures (this one so nicely reflecting the lines of the massive arms of the live oak in the background) seem sadly out of place, a small island of natural beauty and peace in a sea of manmade change.

A friend with a foot in both camps (Floyd and the Grand Strand) echoes the concern of many that his coastal home is being loved to death. And he shares this piece from the local paper with an eye as well to what might happen to other lovely places we call home.

It’s easy understanding why people find this area so desirable: a magnificent natural setting that includes wondrous beaches, estuaries, blackwater rivers, wetlands and forests; intimate downtowns, with sidewalks enveloped by moss-draped oak trees; terrific local restaurants and family-owned businesses; a slow pace of life; and friendly people.

Unfortunately, unchecked local growth is threatening all of this. And the problem is widespread: Coastal areas of the United States make up about 17 percent of the country’s land area, but hold about 53 percent of the total population. The Southeast, which in 2003 was the least populated coastal region in the United States, is growing the fastest. At the current growth rate, Horry County’s 250,000 will double to 500,000 by about 2020, and to 1 million by 2032. Given the haphazard way we’ve grown so far, I don’t want to live in the Grand Strand when the permanent population surpasses 1 million people.