Fragments From Floyd

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!

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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.

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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.

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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!)

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"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.

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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.

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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...

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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!

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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.

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Marginal Woodfern, late afternoon in late May, after rain

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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

Posted by fred1st at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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!)

Posted by fred1st at 7:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (2)

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.

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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!

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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!

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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!

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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!

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What does it mean to have (and want to share) a 'sense of place'? This sense of wanting to find or share one's connectedness to his or her surroundings... urban, surburban or rural... finds expression in a quiet corner of the blogging world. I know of only two places where such 'blogs about place' are identified and grouped (Bowen Island Journal and Rebecca Bloods Webloggia). But surely, in the varied posts of all the tens of thousands of bloggers across the globe, there are many, many entries that celebrate nature, beauty, natural and local human history, or culture attached to location. What is it that 'place bloggers' hope to express? Why do readers come to read? Is there potential to grow a sense of community within this niche within the growing weblog-way of self-expression?

Recently, Lisa Thompson of Field Notes and I presented what I called a 'duoblog' with our perceptions of one representation of place and man's relationship to it. From that post, we have met and been communicating over the past week with the blogging couple Pica and Numenius from Feathers of Hope in California about the possible merits of promoting a greater visibility and stronger sense of community within blogs that are already (self- or outsider-) identified as 'blogs about place'. (Pica pens some thoughts on the subject in this post).

Perhaps there are some readers of these three weblogs who at times in your writing about politics or pets or pottery have 'celebrations of the life outside'... a bit of nature or biological interest, a reflection of the history of some plot of special ground, an image of a landscape or some fragment of it... that would find company with other similar offerings. Would a central 'watering hole' for this (as yet poorly defined) type of subject matter be worth creating?

I am longer on ideas than I am on technology. If and when we (= whoever the group of correspondents on the subject turns out to be) have an AHA! moment and decide what to do, putting feet on it will be beyond my technological experience. We may be soliciting opinions and a few techie hints as we discuss what (if anything) might become of 'blogs of place'. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts. (I am posting this in a most unformed state, but have come to expect your indulgence... lord knows the other unformed twaddle I've broadcast in the past 13 months and gotten away with it!)

I'd work out my thoughts with greater precision, but it is time before the rain comes in later this morning to put the first patch of Silver Queen in the ground. And I am hoping that this year, the garden soil will not be as far down as it was last year! Funny how that happens, n'est ce pas?

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A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or a scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before, and this gives him a sense both of richness and of understanding. The creative mind is a mind that looks for unexpected likenesses.

Jacob Bronowski

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A thousand years ago on a day in May, a non-European pair of eyes surveyed the skyline from atop the mountain peak we now call Rocky Knob on the motor road called the Blue Ridge Parkway. For a few days after the occasional cold front would slide down from Canada, it would be clear and Spring-crisp; those eyes could clearly see the skyline thirty miles away standing razor-sharp, in indigo blue against the brilliant cerulean sky. Other times in the spring and summer, the ridges would appear smudged and fading into the distance, their blues softened and edges blunted by a diaphanous vapor of 'plant breath'-- what we now call transpirational water vapor. It rises in clouds from the wooded valleys, given off as a product of photosynthesis by the sea of broadleaved trees in the Appalachian Forest. For eons, our ridges have been blue', our mountains 'smoky' from a billion breathing leaves.

We've just had a wonderful visitation by cool, clear air, and the world had edges that almost hum with energy. As that giant air mass moves on, plant vapor will accumulate and the distant ridges grow blue and smoky. But then, a few days later and for much of the summer, those landmarks beyond two or three miles away will disappear in a blue-gray photochemical smog. The two million visitors that travel along the high country on the edge of Floyd County every year will, for months, see only the ridgetop they are driving on and little more beyond. This is an aesthetic tragedy to be sure. But more than that, when I comprehend all that I cannot see in the polluted air, it brings to mind the real tragedy: the death of the southern forest. In my lifetime. Remember the canary in the cage... a harbinger of what was happening unseen in dangerous places? Our canary is unwell. You should care.

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Two creeks make one. Goose Creek on the right flows between the house and barn; you can see a bit of the barn roof through the trees. The larger creek on the left has no name. It follows the edge of the pasture, and wears a rock wall like a necklace.

I have just come in from tilling the garden; and thus begins our second gardening year here on Goose Creek. The first year, the present garden site was not our first choice. Then, it was a shabby patch of head-high briars and sumac and my first choice was across the creek, in the pasture over next to the barn where I could keep my garden tools handy. My first task was to put up metal posts to hold a four-strand electric fence to discourage if not prevent the garden produce from becoming 'Wildlife Salad'. In ten attempts to drive in the first metal post, ten failures in the top six inches of soil, ending in a jarring metallic clank against buried 'river jack'. We decided to relocate to the briar patch instead, where the posts went deep enough to put up the pretend deerproofing.

In my first dozen passes over new garden with the tiller that first year, I was jolted to a sudden stop when the tiller tines got hooked under a buried fender of a rusted ancient farm vehicle of some sort. This year, it is stream-deposited rocks I am turning up.. from softball sized round river rocks up to melon-sized (and larger) oddities looking like the potato-shaped moons of Mars. The bigger ones send the tiller lurching suddenly sideways. I've worked clay soil that took three passes to penetrate; and I've snipped old fence wire from the tiller tines in other gardens more than once; but I have never had to do battle with submerged rocks like this. They lurk like enemy submarines, threatening to throw me sideways just as my mind begins to wander and I lower my guard. I have learned, after a few painful bruises, to stand well behind the tiller handles while working the rocky ground, and so this year, the hip bones may come out less black and blue than last. Pain is a great teacher.

On the shady side of the pasture along the creek our foot trail follows the low rough wall of lichen-covered rock piled for a hundred years along the rim of the nameless creek. Especially after my tiring hour with the rocks in the garden today, I appreciate what it must have been like, five generations ago, for our forebears here to have walked behind a ragged pair of mules down row and furrow, all day long. Every little bit farmer and beast would be stopped of a sudden as the plow became wedged under a 200 pound river rock-- fragments of mountaintops dropped in the flat valley floor millenia ago by earth-shaping floods. Man and mule would have rolled the large rocks from the soil onto a wooden sledge and pulled them to the edge of the field, unloading rock after rock, year after year, building a fence made of toil.

This process cleared the pasture of plowing obstacles, of course, and the low wall also protected the field from floods that, from clues left in the terrain, must have been unprecedented by today's standards of 'heavy rains'. In years since, the creek has undercut the banks below the wall in places, and there the crude pile of rock has tumbled back into the creek, to wash in powerful storms to someone else's valley pasture downstream. Millenia from now, some other soul nearer the coast will find our recycled rocks in a sudden jolt, with a tiller or plow, and the story will begin once more.

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No adults were left standing today after Hurricane Abby passed through the northeast corner of Floyd County Virginia. Survivors are expected to be slow to emerge on Wednesday following the storm.

Somebody show me a better way to do this than an html table. Whadda I know!

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.... but do I have to shut my 'puter down every time I feel the house shake and the lights flicker? What are your experiences with the combination of lightning and computers?

I've had two modems and a video card fried in the past. Now I have a APC Backup UPS-ES 350 with everything going through it. How safe am I, really? The thing comes with a warrantee of replacement up to xx thousand dollars if my system gets toasted while it is in use. How good is the equipment, how good is the guarantee, and can I leave the system on instead of shutting it down a hundred times between now and October?

Hep me, brethren and sistren. Shed some light on me, if you will.

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I was Abby's age now-- about two years and two months old --when my baby brother came home from the hospital. I held him with close supervision on a pillow in my lap. And that is my first clear memory. How old were you when you had your first 'permanent' memory? Do you think that Abby here will remember her visit to the farm to visit Granny Annie and Grampa Grumpy (translates to Dumpa Dumpy)? Will she remember wading in the cold creek? chasing the big black dog around the yard? or running free in the wide green field? Or will she have a false memory of it because we will tell her the story over and over, and she will see pictures of it, and these will take the place of memory?

Ah. She has just come downstairs and already is pushing her Fisher Price wheelbarrow into my desk chair, severely awake now and ready for another busy day. Abby sleeping is a noun; she has just transformed into a verb. And another day of potential first memories has begun.

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I suppose we've all had older brothers and sisters or neighborhood friends tell us smaller kids how, if you go here at a certain, or maybe ever, the wolves will drag you off in the bushes and eat your arms off! Maybe not that story exactly, but some variation on the theme. And then there are other legends that are promulgated by parents as a sanctioned form of parental lie where the ends are thought to justify the means: "If you don't eat your canned aspargus, you'll grow up to be a sissy and the older boys will kick sand in your face"... or some variation thereupon.

You know I never quite totally believed most of this stuff, really... I could pretty well tell legend from fact, mostly, by the time I was, say, 10 years old. But then, something like this comes along, and a kid has to reexamine his whole world all over again:

It was the summer after fourth grade and I was cruising along one June afternoon under the covered walkway of the new and oh-so-modern 'shopping center' (20 stores side by side and you could walk from Crouche's Drug Store to Wonderland Toy Store stopping to visit in all the stores inbetween! And I had a dollar of 'allowance' to spend!) A car pulled in, and a friend's mom got out and came around to let out my buddy Rick who I hadn't seen since the school year ended a month earlier. I gasped: he was in a plaster cast that covered his trunk from neck to pelvis. He had to turn his whole body to look at me when I called out to him.

"Rick! What happened to you?" He smiled sheepishly, and his mother answered.

"He tried to hold a sneeze and his spine went all out of joint and he has to wear this cast for the whole summer".

That, dear friend, was a life-changing event that I have never forgotten. And so I solemnly offer this warning:

Even at the risk of covering your monitor there in front of you with a mucoid mist of phelgmatic flecks and filaments, what ever you do, let your AHHHH! AHHHH! end in CHOOOOOO!

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Has America crossed the stupid line in our latest episode of military Coca-colanization? Do you suffer (or have you finally recovered from) leisure sickness and might this have a connection with affluenza? Does this disorder result in gorilla snot? I bet you thought that reax meant to submit your question one more time, didn't you? And will Fragmented Fred become an upshifter? (Not bloody likely!)

If you think I've finally wandered off and forgot my medications, go to the Word Spy where you can learn about "recently coined words and phrases, old words that are being used in new ways, and existing words that have enjoyed a recent renaissance. These aren't "stunt words" or "sniglets," but new words and phrases that have appeared in newspapers, magazines, books, press releases, and Web sites".

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Our grown children are both coming to visit us this week, one with the grandchild to boot, so it will likely be a rather light blogging week (I hear the sigh of relief from both Fragments-oppressed readers). I have strick orders to take extraordinary efforts to make the place look well cared-for.

If it looks shabby and neglected, the children might see us as incompetent and try to put us in a 'home', says the wife. She hears them having a private conversation: "They'll wander off into the pasture or both suddenly take naps with the bacon frying on the stove and set the house on fire, poor dears". My list, therefore, is long.

So, with it being Sunday and all, bretheren and sisteren, I can verily say that my dear bride hath been granted the Gift of Exhortation. And I am the only exhortee... and I'm sweepin' it here, boss.

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The phenomenon of senesthesia has always fascinated me. The word first came into public use during the LSD era, when our college roommates were tasting music and hearing the clouds. Remember? My interest was piqued as I read about this condition of fused sensations, not fully accepted as 'real' at the time, because it seemed to me that there might be some way in which 'normal' non-senesthetes employed this cross-wiring in a creative way, while not overtly manifesting the true 'symptoms' of seeing numbers in colors, for instance.

My suspicions are (tentatively) confirmed by this (multi-page) article from Scientific American, that includes the following excerpt:

Our insights into the neurological basis of synesthesia could help explain some of the creativity of painters, poets and novelists. According to one study, the condition is seven times as common in creative people as in the general population.

One skill that many creative people share is a facility for using metaphor ("It is the east, and Juliet is the sun"). It is as if their brains are set up to make links between seemingly unrelated domains--such as the sun and a beautiful young woman. In other words, just as synesthesia involves making arbitrary links between seemingly unrelated perceptual entities such as colors and numbers, metaphor involves making links between seemingly unrelated conceptual realms. Perhaps this is not just a coincidence.

What's more, this condition tends to run in families, suggesting there is a genetic source that "could lead to both synesthesia and to a propensity toward linking seemingly unrelated concepts and ideas--in short, creativity. This would explain why the apparently useless synesthesia gene has survived in the population".

Like PsYcHeDeLiC, Man!

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Friends of Frogs Almost 800 toads, frogs and newts have been saved from being squashed by traffic in Bath. Go Toads!

Bloom times in the Southern Mountains here, and here.

Links to the World of Photography: Education and Appreciation, from Soulcatcher... the work of Eric J. Keller.

Name That Tune (I had to Google. I lose)

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This borrowed from Gary at TFS Reluctant, borrowed from... I just had to add this one to my Winter string of Hokey Pokey posts.

WASHINGTON POST STYLE has a contest in which readers submit instructions for doing various things, their choice, as written by famous authors. Jeff Brechlin of Potomac Falls recently won for the following, for wonderfully obvious reasons:

The Hokey Pokey (as written by W. Shakespeare)

O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.

Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.

The Hoke, the poke -- banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, 'tis what it's all about.

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At the risk of diminishing the whole by excerpting, I offer this fragment from Rana at Eclectic Mind, about the death of an eccentric unappreciated aunt and the life of a memory. Now go read it all.

I did something tonight for which I’ll probably pay on Saturday. When Aunt K. died Mother hired a rent-a-preacher. He had a typed sermon with blanks for the deceased’s name. He wrote her name in the first blank, but not the others, so that when he made it to page two, he had to flip back to the first sheet to see what to call the dearly departed. I couldn’t run the risk of sitting through another utilitarian service arranged by my Mother who treated K.’s death and now E.’s as a supreme inconvenience.

I called the minister who will be delivering the eulogy and told him some things about E., about her love of beautiful things, her elegant handwriting, and the conundrum she faced in balancing her love for cats with her hobby of raising birds. Mother will do a fine job of running down the vital statistics but I think E. deserves something more than the standard West Texas Funeral Sermon. I can summarize it quickly if you’re unfamiliar with the text. “She fought the good fight through the valley of the shadow of death and went on to the house not made with hands. Amen.” (Of course a guy in a shiny suit at a pulpit can get a good 45 minutes out of that.)

What would you want said about your life and purpose at your final ceremony that may be lost in the lifeless 'vital statistics' of when and where?

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In the next issue of Trunks, Twigs and Branches, the acclaimed regional publication by and about Wood Hunters, we'll have an interview with a local Floyd County man who bagged a late-season brace of trophy-quality mixed hardwoods from an undisclosed location near Saggy Bottom Road. He is pictured here with his catch proudly displayed in the bed of his specially designed hunting vehicle, on his way to the local checkin to register his take for the day.

The man refused to give his real name, preferring to be called by the nickname Fred, claiming that if others knew his identity and residence, they might be able to find his favored hunting area where these beauties were taken with a Stihl 026, 50:1 gas mix, 16 inch bar. Fred claims he does not use calls or scents, but admits that he has been known at times to lure in his prey with a scattering of sawdust and decoy branches.

"I had my limit and was on my way home by 9:00", Fred stated. Although usually he air-dries his catch and dresses his trophies for home use, he says in light of the increasing interest in the sport and the harvest, he is thinking for this day's catch to fillet it into slender pieces, and when it's dry, wrap a dozen or so pieces in shrink-wrap and sell it at the local Bed and Breakfast, where tourists think it is a bit of a novelty and will pay up to $5 per bundle. "In my house, we consume it like it grows on trees" said Fred.

"What I hate to see is where a careless and thoughtless wood hunter has been in, downed a specimen of takable size, and then taken only the choicest parts, leaving limbs and brances to rot. It's horrible. It just makes me sick" he said. Shoot to kill, and leave only sawdust behind, he advises.

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Approaching late mid-spring by my own personal calendar of the season. The Mayapples have sprung up almost overnight, most are two leaved and so bear the single waxy white flower hidden underneath (and under the Mayapples is where I found the morels!). Northern Maidenhair Ferns are in their most delicate and perfect symmetry now, gathering light in the dappled glades before the overstory fills in completely. Interrupted fern, New York Fern, Cinnamon, Christmas, Sensitive, HayScented Ferns. Onoclea sensibilis. Thelypteris noveboracensis. Dennstaedtia punctilobula. Osmunda cinnamomea. God made ferns to show what he could do with a leaf, someone said. There is also a kind of poetry in fern names and if I am alone, I may repeat their names outloud.

With all the rain we've had this spring, the pasture grass is tall enough now to blow gracefully with the breezes, green blades bending in unison in swirls and swaths, as if a great invisible hand tenderly stroked the thick green pelt of a favored creature. We'll get two cutttings this year, easily, I think.

Found: three morels. Enough to provide the suggestion of sweet earthiness to the stroganoff, three more would have been better. The first, found by accident. On the second foray with bag in hand, I am convinced they disguised themselves and became invisible. Hint for next year: Never carry a bag where they can see it.

We've had a request to export some of last year's blackberry and black raspberry jam out of state. (Got it boxed up already, mom). Looking like a good fruiting year up on the back 35 acres, logged unmercifully nine years ago, but coming back now in white pines (some 15 feet tall!) and many, many berries. Ya'll come pick-your-own. We'll provide berries, scratches and ticks.

We've lived here long enough now we know not to expect to harvest many of them. Wild strawberries cover the old postal road up the valley, five-petalled white flowers everywhere underfoot like the day after an outdoor wedding. We'll get none, the turkeys and grouse, chipmunks and groundhogs, and I think especially the box turtles will enjoy them even while the berries are still green.

It was warm enough today to turn on the ceiling fans, and tonight, on the few windows which carried screens over-winter, the top sash will stay down a few inches to let in the cool night air and the sound of the first trilling toads. Time for clothes that suit the weather, and I found a pair of shorts and flashed about two spindly legs the color of the belly of a dead fish. Soft and pale and thin and spindly... wasn't that a song?

Bird sounds. Today, the first Scarlet Tanager, heard but not seen, as usual, somewhere from the uppermost branches where the Indigo Buntings also prefer to perch and sing. Great crested Flycatchers' buzzy calls are coming from the big walnuts over by the barn, and Please-to-meetcha Missus Beecha I still cannot hear from the Chestnut-Sided Warblers. It sounds more to my ear like SwitchYouSwitchYou I SwitchYou! No matter, as long as I remember. No Black Throated Blues or Green Warblers yet this year, and I fear they will be more and more uncommon as our Hemlocks succumb to the Wooly Adelgid.

Last night late, fireflies in ones and twos, just practicing for the Hallelujah Chorus of Fireflies by the gazillions in late June. It gives me chillbumps to think about that constellation of pulsing golden lights come down to earth, on a June night when I can smell the warm pasture grasses in the dark, its pollen offering up the soft round aroma of bread baking, and in the distance, silent summer lightening.

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Feathers of Hope offers this interesting perspective on early amphibian hunting in my hallowed stomping grounds near the Smokies and on Grandfather Mountian in a post that was "inspired by the recent discussion at Field Notes and Fragments from Floyd about a troubling tourism poster from the North Carolina Department of Commerce". He offers encouragement that naturalists have not disappeared and that there is a new extra-academic interest in field related topics. Hmmm. I'll let Numenius explain.

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Another chuckle in a forward of a forward from friend Tim...

Question: How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb?

Roman Catholics: None. Who needs 'em when you have candles?

Episcopalians: Three. One to call the electrician, one to mix the drinks, and one to talk about how much better the old one was.

Pentecostal: 10. One to change the bulb, and nine to pray against the spirit of darkness.

Mormons: Five. One man to change the bulb, and four wives to tell him how to do it.

Presbyterians: None. Lights will go on and off at predestined times.

Unitarians: We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that light bulbs work for you, that is fine.

Lutherans: None. Lutherans don't believe in change.

Baptists: Change! Or spend eternity in a tormenting lake of fire!

Amish: What's a light bulb?

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There were two brothers, according to a story I heard about some family members. One was said to be a fastidious dresser. The other, a fast hideous dresser. I mention this because, twixt me and the spouse, I am fastidious. Spouse is... well, here's a small case study to explain.

If you've been following along here (bless your little hearts) you might recall we have been doing battle with at least one Phoebe who is hell-bent to cohabit our house with us. Finally, with Fredish ingenuity, I managed to repel her and her slimy nesting mud-and-moss-and-birdspit from the lintel over the door. As the wife was about to pop a carotid over this mess, that was a good thing, and the Army of One was commended and allowed to stand at 'parade rest'.

Late during the workday yesterday, said Phoebe reappeared and started not so much a nest as an avian form of 'take THAT!' on top of our front porch light. I waited until the last possible minute to share the bad news with spouse, although I did have a plan for a Phoebe Abatement Program. My carefully considered and next-logical-step idea was to spread a thickish layer of Vaseline on the top of the lamp and then coat it with a heavy blanket of course-ground black pepper. (My mother sent us two kilos of the stuff for Christmas. Thanks mom. Makes a great bird repellent). I was sure we'd be hearing little birdy sneezes (God bless you) and Phoebe would be repulsed and I would once again be a hero. Maybe get a medal of some sort to pin on my Carhartts.

But NO! She would have none of it! Fie on the theoretical chemical defenses! A pox on your puny logical steps! If you're not going to do it RIGHT THIS INSTANT, I'll have to do it myself! she fumed. And Private Fred retired to a safe distance while spouse carried out her fast hideous solution to our problem. Which you can see in Exhibit A above. I rest my case...

After 33 years as an enlisted man, I resisted the urge to tell the General that I thought the birdpoop on the porch lamp would have looked better than THAT! (And I guess I won't be getting that medal after all. And of course, I expect a prompt court marshall when SHE sees THIS! I'll blog from the brig. Send me a file as an email attachment.)

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We drove home in the rain last night. Dreary all day, a sudden warm rain came in about dark, the fog rose off the roads and fat drops spatted on the steaming asphalt. It made me uneasy. Here and there a drop would bounce kerplop, fat and froglike. I realized soon that it really was frogs...the first of the year. Peepers maybe, little leopard frogs possibly, and occasionally to my dismay, a menacing fat bodied toad.

On a warm rainy May night in southern Alabama decades ago, three college students in shorts, tennis shoes and raincoats crept along the Auburn bypass at midnight, sweeping the roadside with their flashlights. In the subtropical heat of the deep south, amphibians had been active now for months. After an inch of rain that day, the road was literally alive with toads... hundreds of them. That night they collected 70 of them, culling through three times that many so that of the two common species, all 70 were the same kind: Bufo woodhousei fowleri. Fowlers toad. One of the lanky students would use them in his diabolical masters research.

I was that student, and I can tell you with all candor that my motives and hopes were pure. But I shall not tell you how those squatty amphibians gave their lives to science that May long ago. I'll just say this: it happened late at night in the silent basement of the Nuclear Science Center and involved radioactive zinc. Upon my honor this is a tale sad but true. The fates have been kind; I have mostly forgotten the purpose, the design or the outcome of the experiment. Nevertheless, I do have one most hideous memory burned permanently in the occipital lobe of the cortex, between those bumps on my skull that house AMATIVENESS and PHILOPROGENITIVENESS for all those among you who understand the proven science of Phrenology .

It was some warm Alabama months later. For reasons I don't recall, I found myself digging down into that narrow slit of storage behind the back seat of my red VW beetle. There in a compressed lump I found my blue raincoat I had worn but not seen since the Night of the Road Toads.

Hmmm. Something lumpish in the pocket here, thin and stiff. My hand fell on an odd texture, somewhat like paper, rough, angular and unfamiliar. And from the pocket I pulled one two-dimensional Fowlers Toad that didn't make it into the laboratory that awful night. It was, of course, thoroughly mummified in a threatening posture with sneer most diabolical on its warty face, promising, one day, the Revenge of the Toads! Oh The HOrrOr!

I left Alabama after that life changing incident, moving north to Virginia so as to escape if possible this gruesome amphibian vendetta. And so you can understand that I rarely violate my rule of 'no driving at night on warm wet roads'. The risk is obvious. Alas, last night, the storm took me by surprise. And there in the headlights... a drop would bounce kerplop, fat and froglike. I realized soon that it really was frogs... and they know where I live!

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or Cultural Tourism in the Southern Mountains: What's For Sale?

We're teaming up on this one. Fragments first duo-blog... see the end of this unusually long opinion piece for a link to my topic partner today... Lisa of Field Notes.

Promotion of cultural tourism is, in a sense, a form of advertisement proclaiming that culture is for sale. [...]The mountain commodities that tourists want to possess might turn out to be some of the things we Appalachian folk cherish most, and communities throughout the mountain south are making difficult choices right now about who they are, what is precious, what is for sale. They are considering the cost of being transformed for the price of jobs and county revenues as their culture is offered up for public view, purchase and consumption...

I was in this frame of mind last week and penned the paragraph above as I completed my little study of cultural tourism in Floyd County. That same day, I picked up my most recent copy of a favorite regional magazine. Inside the front cover was a full page advertisement that I presume is supposed to make me want to 'go see' the mountains of North Carolina. The advertisers wanted this scenic image to speak a thousand words that say 'come, stay, spend'. To me, the billboard in the picture sends a different message, although I have not been able to say what that message is exactly, nor can I say just now why it has gotten under my skin in such a way. Here is the image; take a look at it if you want this piece to make any sense at all. Now showing: Sunset and Clouds. It bothers me. Why is that?

I think I know this mountaintop in the picture. It appears to be Bald Mountain where the Appalachian trail follows the North Carolina-Tennessee border. The view from the top is truly spectacular in all directions. Several years back, I hiked about five miles to the crest, climbing a thousand feet or more to get to the bald mountaintop; the purchase of the experience with my efforts made it all the more spectacular and memorable. What I didn't realize as I surveyed the world from this high place set apart from the busyness of men is that a huge chunk of mountainside here was in private holding and had been 'developed' up to the very edge of the Appalachian Trail. I remember the feeling of profound disappointment that came with this discovery. It had seemed that I was in a sacred place of natural solitude. But I wasn't a three minute walk away from the nearest television set. This may seem sort of trivial, but it was my first reaction when I saw the the billboard on the mountaintop... this image is dishonest, not what it seems.

But then, isn't advertising all about seeming, illusion, and inflating expectations? I am generally resistant to the idea of being 'marketed'. Call me a 'reluctant tourist'. And I'm especially vigilant when it comes to buying into advertising that sells the places where things make their homes -- people, plants and animals. In much of the marketing of mere mountain aesthetics, things portrayed are not as they seem, and in this perhaps lies the heart of my unrest with the Clouds and Sunset image. You might want to be aware in this regard that North Carolina's state motto is actually "Esse Quam Videri"... To be rather than to seem. Yet here and throughout the southern Highlands, in regard to tourists' expectations as they encounter the natural world, it is often the seeming that takes precedence over being.

As a nation we are becoming increasingly detached from the natural world, accepting ourselves as separate from and independent of place, each of us easily-exportable to whatever state or city we can find our comfortable and accustomed amenities. Clear it, pave it, air condition it, put out a few token indoor plants (plastic is fine). Turn on the (whatever) and tune out. We are fast becoming a comfortably cocooned nation of illiterates with regard to the natural world. For too many, the interest ends at the TV viewing of 'nature' from the comfort of our Lazy Boys or from car windows at selected scenic overlooks along buzzing interstates between burgeoning cities. In our vacationing, nature is often reduced to a packet of Kodachrome travel postcards of mountaintop views that give us the warm fuzzies. They ask nothing more from us than to view. We may not really care, for example, that just beyond the edge of the picture is a massive stand of Fraser Fir trees dying from the effects of acid rain caused by the 'cheap coal' that is turning Kentucky and West Virginia into a national sacrifice area. There are other trees. We'll just get more. It's fine as long as things mostly 'seem' to be postcard perfect while we're vacationing there. Ignorant of the real thing, we'll readily accept counterfeits, substitutes, nature illusions. And too bad about the trees, really.

This disconnect with nature is happening even in our universities, where field-related courses are dropping from curricula at an alarming rate. Biology departments are moving whole cloth to mathematical modeling of natural systems: "computational biology" it is called. We don't need to do systematics studies in the field, to collect, catalog and appreciate actual plants or animals anymore. We can just get genetic samples and understand it all in this most objective, quantitative way without getting our boots muddy. The whole of nature is coming more and more to be nothing but the sum of the parts. Those rare hold outs who used to be called 'naturalists' who comprehend the natural world with any kind of holism and find their voice from the midst of it, are growing fewer and fewer in number. And this broader, deeper kind of knowledge and the caring of the natural world no longer resides in Everyman. Our grandparents could name the trees, read the seasons in the grasses, knew when and where to go to find herbs to eat, heal and delight. They understood their absolute dependence on woods and field and this led to an appropriate awe and reverence for the created world. Our children, sadly, are not likely to know or comprehend either the forest or the trees. They may neither know nor care to know that the natural world is being impacted by their ignorance, ambivalence or voracious consumption. Thus the whimpering end of anything resembling stewardship.

Nature it seems is still big business, despite the fact that it's relevance for man and comprehension of it have been reduced to mathematical formulae and base-pair sequences and it's perception trivialized by pith-helmeted TV Aussies mock-wrestling with 'deadly' reptiles. People still love 'nature as scenery' and come to the southern mountains in a huge wave to consume it as a rustic peep-show. In North Carolina, the Blue Ridge mountainsides are being bought and sold and 'developed' at alarming speed. From both the east and west facing slopes across a single valley full of shopping centers below, summer residents from Florida peep at each other from the decks of their expensive faux-Swiss chalets. They are loving the mountains to an suffocating high-density death. They have come to live in the unspoiled mountains as adverted, but being is different from what it seemed to be when they were looking at glossy brochures back in Florida.

Mountain communities hungry for tourist dollars are throwing up cheap look-alike motels and franchised fast foods to accommodate their new visitors. Since so many tourists tire quickly of scenery (if you've seen and photographed one tree/stream/mountain, you've seen'em all), Hill-billy Carpet Golf and Thunder Road Go-Cart Tracks provide entertainment and all the accustomed comforts of urban home towns are being offered, changing forever the culture of many tourism-altered mountain towns. The mountains themselves and the natural ecosystems that they have engendered have become reduced to an icon of place, a mere backdrop, a facade, a token of a former time when the natural world was far more to us than a featured showing of sunset and clouds. We have become nature spectators and can turn it on or turn it off as we chose.

There is a difference between seeming and being in the southern mountains and with regard to our vanishing cultures, natural and human. It would seem there is still so much of the forests and mountains left in the southern Appalachians that man is at no risk of using them up by building roads and chalets and shopping strips without limits. It seems from a distance like these are the unspoiled Hemlock and Fir capped ridges we saw here when vacationing as a child, even though entire species (including these two) are disappearing, both dying at least in part by manmade causes. It seems like it doesn't make any difference if we understand the ecosystems and the cultures we are offering for sale as long as people are finding jobs and incomes out of the transaction. And if you only come here as a transient spectator without any care to understand the people and their place in the world, it may seem that it's all just a theme park sideshow full of stereotyped characters and props, with lots of country-cute souvenirs for the neighbors back home. Now Showing: Rural Farmer and Cows.

Caveat emptor. Be a careful tourist.

Lisa Thompson was kind enough to give me her reaction to the Sunset and Clouds image. I met Lisa via Rebecca Blood's "Blogs about Place" where our weblogs both reside. She writes eloquently on nature-related issues (and other things) over at her weblog, Field Notes. She shares her reflections regarding tourism imagery from a more geographically-detached point of view, writing from the coast of California. I was interested in getting another opinion and appreciate her words. Go see what she has to say on this topic (05/06/03 if the permalink doesn't work ). We'd both love to hear your comments.

Posted by fred1st at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (2)

I got verbose, loquacious and generally full of words and couldn't help myself and have this massively long post coming up at 8:00, co-posting.... simulcasting, you might say... with a west-coast partner (who, bless her heart, had to get up at 5:00 her time to hit the send button) and so I'll take it easy on you word-count-wise NOW, but remember... you were warned!

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Images of Rolfe Horn. Via The Cassandra Pages

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Where our land ends, a Wild Place begins. Picture a "V" 500 feet on its sides and at the bottom, a tumbling creek gurgling, flowing past, dropping over, curling around jumbled boulders and broken trees-- parts of massive hemlocks and pines dropped and broken away from thin soil by ice storm and Hurricane Hugo. Along and high above this falling branch runs an old postal road on which a man on horseback delivered saddlebags of mail from the once-thriving farming community of Simpsons to the remote families that inhabited our spare valley. No one goes here anymore, except a peculiar middle-aged couple of tree-huggers, and a dog. It's one of our favorite places, and I'll only show you if you don't tell anyone else. Promise?

We walk that high handmade road from time to time, looking down the "V" in places fifty feet or more above the creek below, seeing falls upon falls. It's way too steep to venture down those banks and we find ourselves saying "one day we need to start on our place, where the banks aren't so steep, and just walk the creek up into the canyon here". But we never had. Until yesterday I did.

The old timers pass our place here sometimes and notice that the homeplace has been given a new life. They knew this place better than we do, living around here all their lives, and they stop to chat. "I'll bet you enjoy dipping in the old 'green holes' up the creek there. We used to gather there back when we's kids. Some of those holes were deep enough to dive in".

"Well, no sir" I tell them, "the deep plunge pools have pretty well filled in with silt and creek gravel. There wasn't much farming upstream, I reckon, when you were a little boy. But it's pretty, just the same".

Still, I imagine sliding into one of those dark green-black pools, shedding all encumbrances and cares, gasping with the first shock, feeling on my skin the sting of water the temperature of the very earth, slipping down, down and under emerald water, in a wild place under a warm blue summer sky.

See the image of the mountain stream once again. And read these liquid words from Sainteros. Ahhh. Goosebumps.

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I think I'm falling into a pattern here with the weblog week. Unlike many bloggers, I do usually post a half dozen or so entries over the weekend (I can't help myself). Visit records suggest not many people read blogs (at least not mine) over weekends. So, on Monday mornings, won't most Fragments readers already find new entries to read from Saturday and Sunday, added here when they were pursuing a life apart from the blogosphere (rumour has it there is one)? Sure. So don't load too much to the blog on Monday mornings, give folks a chance to catch up. Kick back and have some hot chocolate, browse your blogroll and maybe add a post Monday afternoon, sez Fred.

Well, maybe just this one post:

Design in Nature

I see it every day and it gives me great joy! But getting stunning photographs of it is another matter. But this man did it. Do take a look.

...Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German instructor of sculpture who used his remarkable photographs of plant studies to educate his students about design in nature. Self-taught in photography, he devoted himself to the study of nature, photographing nothing but plants for thirty-five years.

...His photographs were taken using either a vertical or horizontal perspective and could be magnified up to twenty-seven times their actual size, revealing extraordinary details within the natural structure of the plants. In the process he created some of the most innovative photographic work of his time; the simple yet expressive forms captured on film affirmed his boundless artistic and intellectual ability.

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Found. Upstairs in The Very Back Room. This favorite photo that was one of my very first flower images. I think I used a screw-in closeup filter on a 200mm lens on my Minolta SRT101 mounted on a tripod. Printed and matted years and years ago, for some reason, it never found a frame and has traveled from house to house with us through the years, spotted occasionally as the odd drawer is opened looking for spare light bulbs and such. Before it goes back into its dark corner, I thought I would share it with you.

The flowers were backlit by a trickling brook where the light was glinting and flashing as it passed over stones. The long focal length lens compressed other violet leaves in the foreground and the slow shutter speed captured ghost images as the light flickered behind the subject.

It is remarkable to me how focusing my attention so intensely in the process of taking an image freezes the moment in memory. There has always been for me a special relationship between pictures and words, and here at Fragments, I often will pull up an image first, and then find what words come out of it, what memories and moods it evokes, see if I can find the story it tells. Looking through my slides, boxes of one-hour prints, and my digital archives is a great antidote to writer's block. Hope occasionally you find a story in a picture you see here.

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An unhappy update regarding our Homeland Defense:

I've been doing my homework about the carpenter bees, and I'm afraid I am losing this match after all. The chunky little beebombers I have been zinging with the tennis racquet have been the stingerless males, I have learned. The females have stingers, and they know how to use them. They live up in those 1/2 inch holes I just found in the fascia under the gutters above the roof of the addition... a sloping slick metal roof I might add. But no worries. The advisors say I can just go up in the dark when they are inactive (the bees, not the advisors) and poison the (up to 4') tunnels where they and their evil woodchewing brood live in the substance of my very home! Wait! I smell an ambush here. Fearsome Fred on a sloping metal roof in the dark with toxic substances and my fascia full of the Republican Guard of the Bee World waiting to catch me before I get back to the ladder. Been nice knowin' ya.

And, adding insult to (most certain future) injury: The phoebe defeated our first attempt to run her off, and made another cowpie on our lentel above the front door. So, ever resourceful, I fashioned a 2 x 4 on a slant to eliminate the flat nesting surface and prevent any more nestpoop deposits on our porch. So, I just discovered, in an act of avian defiance, she has moved over ... of all places... to our porch lamp to the side of the door and has slimed the very inhospitable conical top of it with her nest gradoo... which is to say "take that you big-headed hairy biped". And I'm sorry, pacifist bird fanciers, to tell you that there has been an escalation of force. The .22 is propped by the door, and loaded with hollow-points, and I am expecting later today a spectacular Roman-candle-like explosion of feathers as certain phoebegenes are instaneously eliminated from the gene pool. Nature red in tooth and claw, and we got the opposable thumbs and the 4-power rifle scopes. Life's not fair. Get over it.

But the carpenter ants do seem to be under control.

One out of three ain't bad, eh? Give me some encouragement here. The 'lower organisms' are getting the upper hand and I'm feeling like I slithered slowly into the shallow end of the gene pool.

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A general store closed in 1952 has been untouched until recently. Here's what was inside. Remember Orange Crush? And hey! I remember watching the mixing bowl on top of the Mixmaster go round and round like magic, and the rubber smell of the thick black cord... and I'd be happy to take some of the furniture off their hands (toward the bottom of the many images, takes a while to load).

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First the Army will have them (Done. Up to 2000 pounds worth in a single 'bunker-buster'). Then individual American soldiers will have them (by 2006). Wanna bet that even before that, some middle Eastern 'freedom fighters' have 'em too? Thermobaric weapons... yet another American technological means of 'keeping the peace'. Damned if we do. Damned if we don't.

"With the M16 (rifle, the American infantry's longtime standard), it took a considerable amount of ammunition to take out a squad of people," said Patrick Garrett, an analyst with Globalsecurity.org. "With this air-bursting ammunition, the XM29 will be able to put those people on the ground in one shot."

Once the fire dies down, the mist sucks all of the oxygen out of the confined space. Those who manage to escape the thermobaric flames and pressure waves quickly expire from asphyxiation.

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The following excerpt is from a poem, entitled Small Farms Disappearing in Tennessee, by Jim Wayne Miller, the late Poet Laureate of Kentucky

Some rather lengthy thoughts along these lines soon to come. And possibly a dual blog on the topic with a fellow 'blogger about place'. Stay tuned.

Also running in this same neural pathway are thoughts about the consequences of our growing ignorance and superficiality when it comes to understanding not only the culture of humans but of animals and ecosystems as well.

In a Guardian Article called Nature's Voyeurs , Richard Mabey expresses his concern that "shallow wildlife documentaries and sentimental nature writing reflect a growing malaise... Unless we radically transform our attitude to other species, we face a dismal future."

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I learned this morning that meta.popdex.com, which I introduced yesterday, has shifted its focus here in it's infancy toward discussion of the top 50 items on blogdex, popdex and daypop. Sigh. That sort of shifts focus away from vegetables and bugs and clouds and such that you might expect to find here on Fragments and leaves me once more out of the loop. But I did find in those 'popularity' indexes a link to a survey of bloggers about their blogging habits, and posed a question (scroll down to 5/02 on meta.popdex) asking about places that discuss reasons why bloggers blog (seems there are not permalinks yet). I especially appreciated one commenter's remarks to my post....

At the end of the day, I think the contribution blogging will make to knowledge isn’t by stream lining journalism or moving the editorial function of the news to the masses, but simply keeping a written record of millions of people’s ordinary lives – which aren’t always very important or enlightening, but are a kind of knowledge nonetheless, and one that think will end up being very useful to broadening human understanding in the end.

And it’s also just cool. It makes me immensely happy, for example, to know that I can now go and visit a cloudy little shack on the hills of Appalachia and hear about the invading Wild Leeks and the paper wasps. This news is more interesting than anything about the iPod.

I wonder if there would be a way to make a lo-fi-pop-dex – say, the bottom fifty links being blogged everyday. It would be like adjusting the frequency on an old ham radio. Of course, I’m also not interested in the iPod, so my judgment here is probably suspect.

I do feel quite under the radar, unheard above the buzz of the techno-politicopundits of the blogging world. It helps to know that some... including you several stalwart regulars ... come around Fragments from time to time to learn about an ordinary life in an extraordinary world. I'd have a hard time keeping the faith without you.

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With the warmer weather, enemy forces have mobilized and have already established fortified positions around our headquarters here on Goose Creek... under the eaves, over the front door, even within the very substance of the house itself. The time has come to carry out the counterattack. Danger lurks. Wish me luck.

We had supper on the front porch for the first time last night. Ah, the sounds of the creek, the gentle breeze as the sun slants across the meadow, the dog flopped out in front of us waiting a morsel from our plates when we're done. All is right with the world and we sat contentedly, surveying with satisfaction all we had done with the old place in four years. And then, YUK! We glance up and That Dang Phoebe has piled moss and mud over the front door again! Black slime oozes down the white siding in a most unappetizing way. Now Phoebes are good birds to have around, being insectivores and all, but the little cow pie over the door had to go.

Meanwhile, the paper wasps have found that tiniest of slits that I didn't manage to get caulked under the front porch roof and they are flying around clumsily, bumping the backs of our heads obnoxiously while we are 'enjoying' our first-of-the-season outdoor meal. Shopping list: latex caulk and a case of wasp spray. Oh, and I must have missed that little strip of foundation at the corner of the porch because there is a motorcade of carpenter ants going up the downspout (I think I hear them singing a little marching song... or maybe I've just seen one too many Pixar animations). I'll call in an airstrike using WMD this weekend.

And from our perch on the porch, the Bleeding Hearts are in full glory, bobbing gently in the late afternoon breeze, being pollinated by... wait! That looks like carpenter bees! Hey Ann, do you remember how Nate and I used to do battle with the carpenter bees? Wait a minute. I'll be back. I ran upstairs to The Very Back Room.

The grip on my old Wilson STING racquet feels familiar, even though it has sat idle now for 6 years. I rotate it just so in my grip, test the full swing of it a time or two. I am ready. Looks like a male. He'll be ornery. There's a swing-and-a-miss. Now he's really riled... he's buzzing madly, saying vile curses in bee language, flying back and forth back and forth in a predictable aggressive pattern... aha! one more zig and on the zag.... PING! Service ace. My ad.

Biological control at its most satisfying best.

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Bet 99% of you never saw... or smelled... the kind of leek I'm talking about. I refer of course to the much maligned native northeastern American plant called the RAMP (Allium tricoccum), also known as the 'wild leek'. They grow in rich moist woods across a wide swath from Nova Scotia to as far south as nothern Georgia and Alabama. It's flavor and aroma is a bit like a cross between an onion and a garlic, but on steroids.

Guess what: Ramps have become haute cuisine and sell now for about $11 a pound. These sleek members of the lily family make a great addition to a homemade ham sandwich, I want to tell you. A friend and I 'discovered' ramps all around us twenty years ago when we had first moved up to Virginia from Alabama, and thought we needed to celebrate by eating a few. Wife declared upon our return from the woods with a mess of 'em, "If you come in with those, I'm going out". We did, and she did.

Yes, they're that strong.

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Only greener.

I see Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome fame, Joanie DaGoddess, Venomous Kate and some other names I recognize among the instigators. MetaPopdex.com which is opening its doors publically just in the last day or so and offers to become... well, I don't know, exactly where it will go. Suppose it sort of depends on those of us who hang out there. To boldly go...

Thanks, ya'll for getting this off the ground. But does anybody know how to fly this thing?

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Fragments Posts - New Settings--

VERBOSITY: LOW
SCHMALTZ-FACTOR: OFF
POETIC QUOTIENT: LOWEST
LENGTH: SHORT

We walked up high this morning. It was wet and fog was in the valley. We saw a big patch of young Hemlocks coming up. But they will die.

It was cool. Ann wanted a fire. I said no. So she baked bread. Now I am sweating. She won.

Additional Settings--

HOME ALONE FACTOR: OFF
HONEYDO LIST: LONG
FOCUS FOR DAY: TBA

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There is a certain sadness that comes with the leafing of the trees as Spring creeps up the valleys and southern slopes to overwhelm even the high remote ridges here by mid-May. This blooming flood of a million living leaves...oak and spicebush, tulip poplar and ironwood, sarvice, dogwood, sumac and cherry... is already filling in the gray forms of winter trees, hiding branch, then limb, then trunk. And finally, when it is all done, and small translucent leaves have grown from the size of mouse ears to their full size and opacity, we will not be able to see into or beyond the forest for the trees.

Winter is the time here in the deciduous East to see they lay of the land, follow its contours as they fade into a distant haze, know the rise of fall of the ground under our feet and far beyond. By late Spring, the view stops at the edge of the woods in a wall of leafery. And yet, there is a kind of comfort that comes with the flood of summer greenery, with farms and silos and country homes now tucked into nooks and hollers hidden by a thousand square miles of Appalachian forest.

But already I am imagining October, when leaves let go and fall, trunks and limbs show thin and spare. At an appointed time as regular as the orbit of planets, its hair will fall and we will see the familiar wrinkles and folds of the old skin of these ancient mountains once again.

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