Fragments From Floyd

I came home late Monday after class and labs, her last day here, and as I got out of the car, Abby greeted me:

"I got stung on a gnat" she said.

I told her it probably wasn't a gnat. Maybe it was a yellow jacket. Yeah, that was it. She had a red whelp, an OOWIE she called it, on her forehead. I heard the rest of the predictable story inside. And then she wanted to see a picture of what had stung her. We found the ugly bug-mug above and talked about antennae and mouthparts versus stingers and how they are simply protecting themselves and their babies when they sting. Personally, I think pure meanness enters in, but I didn't tell Abby that.

The dog had got into a nest, directed the swarm to his walking companions, and then after stinging little Abby, pursued the trio of wife, daughter and granddaughter all the way across the creek. I don't know why, but this time of year, yellow jackets are highly piffed at something, and not only do they not want you near their holes in the ground, they don't want you in the same county and will follow you to the death, hopefully theirs.

Ann and I walked in the rain, umbrellas in hand, on the northeasternmost fringes of Katrina yesterday afternoon. As we rounded the bend and started back down the pasture toward the house, I heard an ominous buzzing. "There's one after you" Ann said, walking only a few feet away from me with the dog on leash.

Maybe there was only one. But he might have only been the scout and more were coming. So I took off running through the thigh-high grass, knees pumping, clunky rubber boots pressing the grasses down in my wake and my umbrella swirling around my head as if it were a sword. My straw hat blew off and I just kept running. My umbrella flipped inside-out and finally, thought I'd like to say my feet got tangled in the tall grass, in truth it was from sheer exhaustion: I did an ungraceful face plant in the wet grass. I must have dropped off the radar because the kamikaze fighters were gone when I struggled, breathless, to my feet.

And I just realize this morning upon groaning out of bed, I don't fall so well as I used to. So Abby, I have an oowie on my left hip and my right elbow this morning. The bruises should turn some interesting colors over the next couple of days. And somehow, seeing these critters faces microscopically doesn't do anything to make me think one bit more highly of them for their vicious, late-summer attitudes. Mad as hornets, my Aunt Tilly. Mad as yellow jackets in autumn!

See more UglyBugs here.

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Her parents built it and gradually moved full time to their modest bayfront house in the late fifties. I first saw the place and roamed the bayou woods there in 1968. It was a biology student's dream. The pine woods were full of strange plants--pitcher plants, sundew, bog buttons--and animals. I half expected to see an Ivory Bill there, but had to be satisfied with hognose snakes, nutria, flying squirrels and water birds too numerous to mention.

By the spring of '69, we were engaged. There were several awful weeks in August that year when I didn't know if Ann and her family were dead or alive. The cause was named Camille. The water rose to the foundation of the house, but it stood firm and her family all fared about as well as you can expect for those who stay in their homes during a Class 5 hurricane. By 1970, Biloxi had recovered enough (though it was never the same) that we were able to have our wedding ceremony in the Presbyterian Church on the beachfront on hiway 90.

We went back every break during college as young newlyweds. We'd bring back a freezer full of flounder, speckled trout and shrimp we'd catch off their patchwork pier and live off of it for months. Later, both our children grew fond memories of visits to Grammaw and Grampaw's place across the bay from Keesler where we'd watch the constant flow of planes come and go from the air force base. Frequently, all the siblings and their clans would meet there, and somewhere, there must be a chestful of old peel-off polaroids of one family or another waving goodbye as they left for home in other states.

While her father moved to live with relatives far from the coast several years ago, there are still family there. We've heard from some. We heard last night that the homeplace is gone, but for the foundation. Memories and sense of place, gone with the wind. Our prayers are with those who lost so much more than memories.

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The deer have discovered, as they seem to do at the end of the gardening season, that our small electrical fence is easy to jump over. Daily, my patches of greens and hopeful beds of Buttercrunch lettuce and Chinese Cabbage are punctuated with deep cloven craters. It will be survival of the lucky, if any survive both treading and munching. Ah well. So it goes. Another sunflower here.

The sunflowers, though, are now above deer browse level and are in their final days of glory. I'll harvest the heads of the smaller sunflowers before they drop seed and take over the place next year with their offspring. I'll hang the seedheavy heads over in the tree branches beside the creek for the migrating birds. Won't be long.

I planted buckwheat as a cover crop in unused rectangles like the one where the corn failed to grow. I'd never used that seed before, but I like it. It's white flowers attract pollinators. THe seeds are large and three-sided like tiny beech nuts and I suppose it would reseed itself several times if left along. The stems are soft and succulent and will turn easily back into the soil as a green manure. So I've learned at least one new trick this lackluster gardening year.

We have a heaping five gallon bucket of Brandywine tomatoes to can today after the girls catch the plane back to South Dakota. And grass to mow, sheets to wash, and life goes on. And I must make an effort at the transition from summer's free agent to autumn's indentured educator, from gardener to wood lot manager, from answering the question WHY a hundred times a day this last week with Abby here to asking the question myself to no one in particular and become adjusted once more to the sound of silence again.

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While I concede victory to Abby in the Goose Creek Regata yesterday, I must protest to the judges, and I think I have a valid claim: the dog ate my boat before the finish line.

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A month after the sighting of the Very Large Very Black Bear bounding across our pasture, Ann still totes the .22 Mossberg and/or an 8-ounce miniature fire extinguisher of mace called Bear Stopper or somesuch. And I, on a regular basis, scoff at her precautions as we set out on our daily safari down the steppes of Goose Creek, making our usual looping walk in the evening at dusk.

We see deer regularly; Tsuga sees them by accident, when he brings his nose up off the ground, whereupon, if we had the right kind of eyes, we'd see those little animal footprint trails all over the place--like we used to see in the Sunday Family Circle funny papers. He gets a tasteless, dry crumbly piece of pressed grain hulls every once in a while, and is perfectly happy to stick right with us, more or less, for the twenty minute trip through the twining spider webs and rangy growth of early fall that just now show the barest hints of change. We had turned at the end of the valley and were making our way back through the open pasture where we could get a good view of the pink and mauve of sunset.

"What IS THAT!?" Ann asked, walking ahead of me. The dog had lagged behind in pursuit of a mole.

Across the pasture at right angles to our path, something was running in an odd way through the grass, a month tall now since haying. Color: tawny brown. Gait: very smooth, almost gliding; not dog-like. Build: compact, on shortish legs, maybe 30 pounds. Features: difficult to tell, except Ann noted one thing, I noted another: it didn't have much of a tail. And it had pointed ears.

It was a bobcat. A Very Large Very Fast Bobcat. And when we crossed its path and scent, the dog went berserk, wheeling in his tracks, backtracking, circling, then full speed toward the woods. I had that oh-crap sensation very like when he charged after the bear. We didn't bring the rifle or the leash. Ann called frantically, I ran home for the necessaries.

But this tale ends rather tamely, because the promise of yet another crumble of doggie treat brought the dog out of the woods just as it was getting dark, and by the time I got to the creek, here he came running. Smart dog. I don't think he would have had as easy a time with a 30-pound bobcat as he does with his daily mole.

And dang, if this doesn't just reinforce wifey's latest I-wanna: a Ruger .44 magnum short-barrel rifle. An army of one, here in the wild kingdom.

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She said last night that she liked our cat better than the dog. It might have something to do with the fact that she and the dog are too much alike, compete for the same space, the same attention. The cat is aloof but soft and approachable. And besides, when Abby gets home, she'll be getting a new cat, a 'nicer cat' that doesn't bite and scratch like Baxter, an adopted pound stray, who got 'runned over' last week.

Tsuga is okay with second place. He's basically happy with any place, as long as it's snuggled up close to a human. It helps if she's sticky with pancake syrup, but it isn't essential.

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We were pleased, at Tsuga's last visit to the vet, to learn he has trimmed down from an indulgent near-ninety a year ago to a mere 78 pounds. We keep an eye on his 'adominal tuck' and the indention of his waist--two contours that bulge as a dog approaches obesity. I found this handy chart at left that gives you an idea of the ideal conformation of a puppy physique. And as things will do unbidden, this illustration came to mind as I walked across the college campus yesterday among the flowering of coeds in the summer dress of our times.

Cleavage and belly buttons; low-riding capris, high-riding low-cut tops and push-up bras, and the ubiquitous cell phone--the campus dress du jour. I suppose the point is to unwrap the package just enough to evoke masculine interest while leaving at least a little to the imagination. And in some few cases, for some rare builds, the impact is quite effective. But the style seems rather universal, physiognomy be damned, and it really shouldn't be the style at all for most who wear it. There needs to be a set of guidelines on how little one should cover.

So I imagine a visual guide for coed dress, like the one for doggy physique.

Below the ideal form in the ONE to THREE categories, in the rare undernourished classification, the description might read thusly: Bony hip bones project several inches above top of slacks at pubic line. Knobby sternum evident in plunging V-cut of blouse; ribs prominent, clevage uncloven. Lumbar vertebrae and shoulder blades apparent from posterior view.

Far more commonly, the deviation from the rare IDEAL LEVEL FIVE is toward the SEVEN to NINE body forms: Bony prominences lacking. Handles d'amour lap over constricting waistband of low-riding slacks. Umbilicus obscured but location suggested within horizontal folds. V-cut reveals what appears to be two bald heads side by side on a bumpy road.

Like Seinfeld noted, there's good naked and bad naked. In this case, less really can be less. It is a style created for supermodels, adopted by all. Don't look, Ethel.

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I saw her grown up, this moment in time frozen in sepia memory, some day far future. Seasons of green will come and go. She will not likely remember this simple question, or will she know how her mother's father took more than photographic pictures of her, through time, that instant in the early fall of 2005, in the endless roll of time of which we are short bursts of reason and delight.

What is it? It's a spider egg mass. It is infinity in the palm of your hand, dear child.

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This is what DT tells me in regards to camera lenses and megapixel capacity. And he has gone about as far along this way as one can go. But not quite. THere is one camera that, far as I know, Doug doesn't have yet. But I figure, it's only a matter of time. It's called the R-1, made the garage of Clifford Ross. I'd seen Ross's work (on waves and water) in Orion, but you gotta take a look at the resolution of his Goldbergian camera!

The camera, called the R-1 (R for Ross), looks oddly rigged, like something out of Dr. Seuss, and almost like an antique viewfinder camera on legs. In fact, Mr. Ross pulls a cloth over his head and the back of his contraption when he takes a picture. But with this camera that he concocted out of 60-year-old camera parts, mirrors, a microscope and other items - none of them digital - Mr. Ross has taken photographs on 9-by-18-inch negatives that when slowly processed by hand and digitally scanned contain 100 times as much data as the average professional digital camera.

Some of the images from this camera are here. Wow. (Thanks for linkage, Stanley!)

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The only thing that did really well in the garden this year was the sunflowers. You've seen the ten-foot whopper-types I posted a week or two ago. But what dominates the edges of the garden now are the ten-cents-a-pack seeds I got on sale. While the seed packet showed a wide variety of colors in these little pinches of seed, we got mostly small versions of the regular dark yellow petaled variety on seven-foot stalks. A few have the red splash at the base of the petals, and one or two are pale lemon yellow.

The giant sunflowers have gone to drab fruiting orbs, bending forlornly, their necks not able to support their swollen heads any longer. I'll have to decide what to do with all the smaller ones before they set seed. If they drop them in the garden, we'll have a forest of them next year. Hmmm. Maybe that would be so bad after all.

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This blog has been temporarily interrupted by tiny steps in the dark just now--many hours before her usual South Dakota wakeup time. I've been handed a book and ordered to "READ IT!" And so instead of posting about drinking water or potash or Alaskan global warming as planned, I will be reading "If You Give A Pig a Pancake."

Future installments at Fragments, temporarily under new management of the Little Princess who arrived downstairs in her tiara of streaming stars (thank you Granny Annie!), will include: Abby and Tsuga; Abby catching minnows; Abby on horseback; Abby and the Llamas. You get the picture.

I'll be wearing my Grampa Hat today. It gets far too little wear to suit me. (But for the moment, her wee self is sitting on the loveseat wrapped cozy in a blanket, narrating the pictures from a Richard Scary book her mother used to 'read.' It's possible she may just doze off for a while and let me work. I hope not.

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The meat is always sweeter closer to the bone. This was an old bromide I heard and took literally as a child. It made no sense to me then. It all tasted sweet. I hadn't a clue of the passing of things, of scarcity or want, of longing or hunger for what we no longer have.

But especially in the fall, and as the sands dwindle in the hourglass of years, I understand. Color and motion are two props soon to be missing from the stage of seasons passing. They seem more precious for their transient beauties, their color, the motion of wings and falling crimson leaves soon to come.

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It is survival of the fittest. Those who are slow, curteous or hesitant, lose. The unfit are denied their portion of a finite natural resource at or at least near the center of their natural habitat and must range far and wide for alternative niches. There may be aggressive encounters with younger members of the species, and at the last minute, just before it seems there might be an opening, the quicker competitor snatches up the morsel of habitat for himself, and walks away victorious, right elbow flexed, talking to air as is the way of his kind on this prarie campus. The loser howls to the tepid air, rails against the injustice that he, a silver-back male of the species, must grovel for his space. Should he not be honored with a higher place in this heirarchy than this? Had he served his turn as a low-ranking juvenile and subadult all those years only to come to this humiliating anonymity in the teeming thousands who milled about as he did, sweating, cursing, looking for their petty portion of the commons accessible to his kind?

I sure hope that today, I find a parking place.

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Oh great. Just what I need: yet another interesting diversion from my digressions that lead off my sideroads from the six main things I thought I was going to do today. But this painting program looks really cool. This link here carries you to the galleries to see what you can do with this FREE PROGRAM.

Maybe I can tell myself I'm exploring this as something for the grand daughter to do later this week. Yeah, right, Dumpster.

And speaking of our impending visitors, I anticipate Tsuga-Abby pictures ad nauseum. You were warned.

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"Japan to promote "Warm Biz" look to save energy"

To reduce their contribution toward global warming, Japan's Environment Ministry is advocating that business people and government officials shed dress coats and such during warm weather, and wear extra layers during the fall and winter when office temperatures will be turned down to 68 degrees.

What do you think of this idea? What concrete steps is your political party-of-choice advocating to reduce our collective impact on global 'greenhouse gas' buildup? What can you do personally to reduce your use of electricity, gasoline and other fossil fuels (like natural gas and propane?)

This is a topical bullet for class discussion (or at least offering the potential for it) via the weblog for that purpose. If you have a comment, please consider leaving it on the BIOLOGY 103 WEBLOG to 'seed' the discussion, to add some wider viewpoints, and let students who are blog-naive see how easy it is to add comments and get used to the idea this semester. Thanks! -- FF

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Some surprise visitors, friends from our former lives in NC, were waiting for us when we arrived home last night from a little cookout with folks across the county. We had lots of catching up to do, and it took several hours and a couple of glasses of wine to do it. They'll be getting up soon, and the water under our respective bridges will begin flowing again, this time, to coffee.

Now, I'm putting together the final details, uploading chapter notes, and hoping all will go as well as Murphy's Laws will allow today in my first meeting later this morning with 123 biology attendees. Will I find, or help make, some students among them? I have to at least start the term with optimism and hope.

I will play it straight up. No attempts at humor or wit; it falls desperately flat on day one. Day One Freshmen are too intimidated and overwhelmed to laugh, smile or make eye contact with a roomful of strangers. They certainly will not respond to my attempts to get two-way flow going. The silence is deafening. Everyone is alone in their own little bubble of private dialogue. And very little, if any of it, will be related to the syllabus or the topic.

First, in those tense moments before the instructor reassures them, there's the fear that he or she is not in the right room after all. (Being lost, late for an exam, in the wrong course or campus, et cetera is a reoccurring near-nightmare I have occasionally to this day. Do you?) They'll be scoping out the hotties and the hunks out of the corner of their eye. Where should I sit next class to hide as much as possible from the prof, but center ME near the Coolness Center of the class (based on day-one appearances--dress, makeup, swagger--alone) or the babe-section?

It's a science class, after all, so automatically, non-majors (they are all non-majors) will strut a kind of "I'm here because my curriculum said so" attitude, assuming from the first day that this material is unlike any other kind of brain function they've ever done or will ever do or need again, that they're 'not good in science stuff' and that they will be lost by day two. For many of them, what they want out of the class is to get out of the class--survive the semester, do only as much as it takes to make a passing grade, and go on unchanged by anything they (potentially could) have heard during four months.

And, after this awkward, syllabus-intense day is behind us, I will do my very best to make every one of them care about biology--their own, their community's, their planet's. As I will tell them, as college students, they will be among a very small percentage of the world's people who have the opportunity to sit in a college biology class and come away knowing a little of what makes the living world work. It's an awesome privilege, and it carries equally weighty responsibilities. If our young people don't shoulder this work, who will?

So much for my First Day Soapbox. I hear stirring upstairs. We're about to pick up where we left off last night with all of the news from Morganton, our kids-your kids, and the current crop of aches and ailments. I gotta go.

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The full report (mentioned here last Wednesday) regarding the possible economic consequences of Avian Flu Pandemic and possible investor responses is available from the financial group, BMO Nesbitt Burns, as a pdf document.

Investor's Guide to Avian Flu

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Four years ago, when we learned we would soon become grandparents, our daughter offered us a chance to tell her what the new arrival (a girl, we knew by then) should some day call us. Ann said at once "she can call me Granny Annie."

Not to be at a loss for an alliterative match, I said "and she can call me Grampa Grumpy." I figured I'd get around to a replacement before the little princess reached two and had names for things and people. I didn't.

As you know, the names GanGan, Nanna, PawPaw and such are infantile abuses of names similar to the ones we offered. So as fate would have it, I soon became Dumpa Dumpy. I guess it was easier to say. But it gets worse.

Today I got an email from our daughter in South Dakota, who will be visiting along with grandaughter Abby this week. She said she was reading Fragments on her computer the other day when four year old Abby walked in. Abby saw my picture on the weblog front page.

"Hey, it's the Dumpster!" she said.

My daughter cracked up. Laughing, she asked "Abby, do you know what a dumpster is?"

"Yeah. It's a trash can."

A rose by any other name...

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Garden Plotting ** This year's garden was neither the best or the worst garden we've ever had. Among the long list of defeats were some successes. You may remember that I railed against the green beans early in the summer (slow to flower, covered with Japanese Beetles, and not the beans I'd intended but POLE beans unsupported and twining all over the garden). But we harvested 21 quarts off the plants last week, and they are better in taste than Blue Lake and some of the others we've planted. Next year, we'll plant a smaller number of Kentucky Wonder and let them climb up the sunflowers--something that happened accidentally this year. I pulled almost a quart of straight, perfect seven-inch beans off one sunflower stalk that held this running bean up in the light with plenty of room to mature properly. Victory, of sorts, from our mistakes and the forces of entropy. We pulled the spent bean plants the other day; I tilled the bean rows back to a clean slate. There's nothing prettier than a freshly prepared seedbed--such potential, so earthy! I thought as I discovered that deer had left deep cloven pits in my seedbed overnight. Insult to injury, the hoof prints had pierced into the empty blackness of mole tunnels running everywhere, rubbing my nose in our powerlessness against creatures of the night, of the very earth, of the air who must eat too.

School Dazing ** I spent several times longer at Radford than I had planned on Wednesday butting my head against bureaucratic and technological glitches that, as Mr. Murphy so well stated, make things take more time than you have. I visited my assigned classroom (some good little distance across campus from my office) to be sure the laptop would work with the multimedia setup. It didn't. I owe the secretary in the Interior Design office a batch of cookies; I borrowed her phone six times to talk to tech support to problem solve. After installing a new bit of software (air projector client) I was able to wirelessly connect to the system and should be good to go at my first meeting with students on Monday morning. Glad I didn't walk in cold and expect things to work.

Desk Jockeying ** Today I pick up the hardware for the hanging files to go in my bottom drawers of the new desk. I'll have to reinvent a filing system based now on the amazing new assumption that I will actually be able to OPEN the drawer to access the information inside in ALL SEASONS of the year--not just winter when the woodstove sufficiently dried out all the moisture that the swollen particle board had been absorbing, spring and summer and fall. I reach down every so often now and effortlessly open and close the empty drawers on the new desk a few times, just because I can.

PowerPointing ** The program at the library went well last night. No equipment or costume malfunctions. No tips of the slung or gross errors of judgement. Four thousand words read with reasonable enunciation and articulation. It was well attended by Floyd standards. And not a single person lost consciousness during the 25 minute program while the lights were out! It was well-received, I think, and quite a few expressed fellow-feeling in matters of place and belonging. Many had similar stories of finding their homes here in the county quite by accident, discovering that here, there seems to be here a nutrient that we cannot live without. Just what is the essence of belonging and attraction to this place in all the world remains to be understood.

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I guess it never occurred to me to say anything about it. Those who live around here might have seen the little blurb in last week's Floyd Press about it. Those who live off the mountain are not likely to drive this far from home, especially on the first night of school. So, forgive me if you mighta woulda come. Maybe I'll do it again sometime, if the crowd doesn't get too surly tonight.

I'll be exhibiting my little dog and pony show that I did for the Appalachian Studies Conference in March--the so-called photomemoir. I posted links to some of the components back then, some may remember.

So, just in the outside chance there are some who could and would come, it's at 7:30, Jesse Peterman Library in Floyd, about a half mile south of the traffic light in US 221 South. Come early to get a seat (just kidding: first day of school, homework, and thunderstorms, you'll have your pick. And note: overripe veggies are not permitted inside the library.

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I MUST focus on other things this morning, so I'm giving you an assignment, cub reporters.

We have human interest here; we have conflict and sacrifice--young activists (yes, even in our times!) standing in harm's way in a Tennessee strip mine this week, butting heads with corporate coal company stockholders and honest, hardworking, unemployed miners who only want to go to work. Strip mine reclamation on the one hand, a new zeal to level more mountains (at twice the $$ per pound of coal vs 2 years ago) on the other.

AP Wire | 08/17/2005 | Appalachian states working to reforest mine-scarred lands
"Appalachian states working to reforest mine-scarred lands"

Environment News Service ENS Latest Environmental Information Education Current Issues RSS
"Tennessee Coal Road Blocked to Protest Mountaintop Removal Mining" (See also MJS link, end of this post.)

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Appalachia coal mines hiring new generation
"But coal still produces more than half the electricity generated in the U.S., and expanding economies in this country and China have created a huge demand for electricity.

The National Mining Association expects U.S. coal production to be a record 1.14 billion tons this year, up from 1.11 billion last year. And the increase comes amid rising prices: The price of coal from central Appalachia has risen to nearly $60 a ton from roughly $30 a ton two years ago, according to industry analysts."

Mountain Justice Summer / "Reclaiming Appalachia: A Mountain Takeover" This is the organization to which the protestors belong. Here is their 'about' page, and you might be surprised: it's mostly about water. Yes, it is.

And I see there is a chapter of MJS at Virginia Tech. Hmmm.

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From Canada.com Business Center

A major Canadian brokerage firm has added its voice to those warning of the potential global impact of an influenza pandemic, suggesting it could trigger a crisis similar to that of the Great Depression.

..."I think that this particular report really signifies the first time that anyone from within the financial world, when looking at this issue, kind of had one of those 'Oh my God' moments," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

...Sherry Cooper, chief economist of the firm and executive vice-president of the BMO Financial Group said in an interview Tuesday: "It is a big, big issue. I mean, it's almost imponderable," she said. "I have to admit: the more research I did, the more frightened I became."

Conundrum: Do nothing, risk everything. Or, over-react, panic and douse the fire with gasoline. Truly, I do not know where to find the reasonable, prudent middle ground here. All along, it has been the world-economic consequences of this possible pandemic that has loomed in my mind as the largest issue beyond the very many individual deaths.

This is an exercise. This is only an exercise: if you knew with certainty that we faced a future of global economic collapse; knew that it would come on suddenly; knew that it would happen in six to eight months: what concrete steps would you take financially right now? Is anyone asking this kind of forecasting of your financial advisors? Most blew sunshine over anything that discourages investors from business as usual. Just hold tight; keep doing what you've always done, they say. Surely, there are some(at least at BMO Financial Group in Canada) who will be advising their clients toward a different kind of investment for the uncertain months ahead. What would that advice say? Any ideas?

It could very well be that business will not be at all as usual. What is the prudent thing to do to shelter one's assets, one's nestegg, the children's college fund, a retirement from the shock wave of the first quarantine of a major US city? Once something of that magnitude should happen, should it happen, it's possible we'll see just how brittle our economic veneer really is.

There's an elephant in the room. He is unwell and nobody wants to talk about him.

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Well, I don't have time to embellish my fuzzy feelings about the desk, only to say it is incredibly solid and will be one of very few things in this life that outlast us. (One of you gets the wardrobe, one gets the desk. Hear that, kids?)

The lumber is locally harvested white oak, quarter-sawn, with tung oil finish.

Highly recommended: Phoenix Hardwoods, Hiway 221, Floyd Virginia. Call 540.745.6403 or stop by their working showroom. And tell them Fred sent you. If I can send them enough referrals, maybe Bill will give me a good price on some oak shelves to go above my desk. (Price for quality is excellent. You'll see!)

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...or, Metaphors Be With You

Yesterday, for 12 long hours, two of my vital systems were shut down. First the plug was pulled on my nervous system and it was disassembled, it's divers wirey viscera scattered and piled in odd corners of the surgical field (the front room.) Then all storage and retrieval systems, all spatial orientation to life as we know it was piece by piece dissected from the organic whole of me (or whole mess, wife would say) and I suffered from expressive and receptive aphasia (could neither speak or receive communications) and for long hours was disoriented to place and person. Who was I now that both my desk and my computer were in this terrible state of metamorphosis? Would I survive this multi-system surgery?

Okay. I could milk this little metaphor of home improvement for several more medically-tilted paragraphs, but I have oodles of stuff to do before I go to Radford today and get my ship in order for the semester that starts on Monday. The truth of the matter is (and it WAS immensely disruptive) my new white oak desk was delivered yesterday, the old particle board Constant in Life sits on the back porch, bound for the dump. I paid $10 for it 10 years ago, and think I pretty well got my money's worth out of it. Good bye, old friend. And while it may have seemed a study in chaos, there was an order to the mess, and it was a known structure in the unknown universe. But it all had to go.

Just the desk replacement alone would have been a major undertaking. But the computer system that sat on the desk had to come totally apart. And with the massive desk then in place, and even though we designed cutouts in the right places for access to the back of the computer, getting the job done yesterday was something I can see I'll have to hire a teenager to do in a few years. I literally had to crawl into the bottom of the computer console with a flashlight maybe 15 times to get it done.

But I have come out from under anesthesia. The nervous system is working well enough after some initial glitches. But now I have reinhabit my desk-space, learn a new scheme of things in drawer-space so I can lay my hand reflexively on the stapler; find envelopes; grab a blank CD; and locate that stack of unpaid bills before it is too late.

Well I can see I'm not getting any sympathy from you folk. But I'm telling you, this was as close to a heart-lung transplant as I ever want to come. And yet, I've lived through it; I'm blogging again. And I found that stack of bills. I really need to go back to work.

Soon, pictures of my new Bridge from which Jean-Luc navigates the Starship Fragments. No wait. That's mixing metaphors, isn't it?

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In the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, the mortality rate was 3 percent, which seems merciful in comparison with the 50 percent mortality rate of today's highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu. In just the past 18 months, avian flu has caused the death or destruction of more than 140 million birds in 11 Asian nations. And, most alarming, in four of those nations, H5N1 has taken the worried jump from birds to infect humans.

Should the virus shift and human-to-human transmission become sustained, the cost in human lives could be substantial -- especially when vaccine would not become available, at best, until six to nine months after the outbreak of a pandemic. And even then, the vaccine would not be available to every American. Nor do we have enough of the only effective anti-viral agent Tamiflu stockpiled to treat more than 1 percent of our population.

To meet this threat, I propose an unprecedented effort -- a "Manhattan Project for the 21st century" -- not with the goal of creating a destructive new weapon, but to defend against destruction wreaked by infectious diseases such as H5N1 and biological weapons.

Such a project would include substantial increases in support for fundamental research, medical education, emergency capacity and public health infrastructure; the unleashing of the private sector and unprecedented collaboration among government and industry and academia; and the creation of secure stores of treatments and vaccines and vast networks of distribution.

But, above all, I speak of action -- without excuses, without exceptions -- with the goal of protecting every American and the capability to help protect the people of the world.

Many benefits other than survival would follow in train. We will come to understand diseases that we do not now understand and find the cures for diseases that we cannot now cure. It will add to the economy both a potent principle of organization and a stimulus like war, but war's opposite in effect. It will power the productive life of the country into new fields, transforming the information age with unexpected rapidity into the biotechnical age that is to come. Recombinomicsquotes Senator Bill Frist

More of Frist's concerns and hopes for fighting infectious disease, from a speech delivered at Harvard Medical School, June 2005, can be read here.

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I was doubtful that my first judgement of the Bully Bee was correct. What's in it for any other creature (other than humans) to be belligerent and pugnacious merely for the fun of it? But it seemed like that is what this insect was all about. But why waste so much energy merely being obnoxious? What's in it for the Bully Bee, I wondered?

While these heavy-bodied orange wasps seemed equipped as predators by size and speed, in several years of watching them torment skippers and swallowtails on the butterfly bush just outside my window by the desk, I'd never seen one do more than bump the lepidopterans off their blossoms. And immediately the bullied butterfly would return to the same cluster of blooms as if they were not in the least intimidated by the Bully Bee.

But yesterday, I chanced to look carefully at the base of the butterfly bush, and that scene told a different story: the mulch was littered with the disembodied wings of countless victims, I presumed, of a hunting wasp--my so-called Bully Bee. Or at least this was my assumption, awaiting confirmation that would come when I saw the hunt and kill with my own eyes. And today, that happened.

I had my eye on a certain skipper as I daydreamed, and like a shot came the Bully Bee, nailing the little butterfly, and the two of them fell through the branches toward the ground. I jumped up from the computer and went outside to watch this drama unfold, but the two insects, predator and prey, must have fallen into the branches of another shrub below. Soon, however out comes the Bully Bee flying with difficulty, carrying the wingless torso. He lit on a pine branch some ten feet above ground, and in the afternoon light, I could see body parts falling in the breeze, like an eagle eating a fish, tossing away the bones.

So in this observation, thinking back, I have to draw some new conclusions.

First, it occurs to me that this particular wasp is in a favored situation. At any given moment of the day, for six weeks running, there are many dozens of butterflies concentrated in this one small space. To encounter this much food, this many attempts at a meal, the wasp would typically have to cover an enormous distance, using up considerable energy.

The percentage of kills for the Bully Bee is very low. I've seen literally hundreds of attempts (I know now that's what they were, not just rude jostling for the sake of being ornery.) This is the first kill I've seen. This I think says something about the intended prey: they defend themselves better than you'd think. But think about it: the wasp can't successfully hold its prey by the wings. The wings, then, form a shield--sort of a stiff arm-- against predation like the spines on the back and sides of a fish.

I can't tell you how many of our swallowtails by this time of year have bits--sometimes large bits--of wing torn away by a would-be predator that may get a little mouthful of scales and wing, but the body of the butterfly remains unharmed. It never occurred to me before that a butterfly's wings might be protective. I used to blame birds for the tattered wings of August butterflies, but now I have to give credit to this unnamed wasp and his ilk.

I still want a positive ID for this wasp. I've given up getting a picture and don't have any hope for a capture and release. And here, my scientific facade breaks down, when I tell you that the collection method of choice in this instance may involve a raquetball raquet. It works well for carpenter bees.

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Can you imagine that I spent a whole week in conversation with writers, and the word BLOG only came up a couple of times. The first time, Rita Quillen, who I knew from her week as our mentor in poetry at the Radford workshop in 2003, told me she was sending all her students to my blog for the Where I'm From links. (By the way, I got to tell the original author, George Ella Lyon, about the page and gave her my card as she signed my book of her poetry, titled Where I'm From.) The second blog conversation was with Meredith Sue Willis, a Kentucky native now teaching in New York City. If you are a reader, and especially a reader with roots or heart in the southern mountains, you'll find some great resources among Meredith's pages.

From her webpage or her blog, go to writing exercises, a list of her latest books, and to her newsletter, Books for Readers. Consider subscribing. I have.

And thanks, Meredith Sue, for the kind link to Fragments on the most recent newsletter. She links to Fred B. First, which is, after all, my name. And this is what it said on my Hindman nametag. But, as you will understand, with a bummer of a last name like mine, having a middle name that is a verb is an additional curse and the source of endless tired play-on-words. But I digress. I learned from MS's newsletter that another Hindman classmate has a West Virginia poets and poetry blog. Stop over at Sherry Chandler's if you're interested in what is happening in that active community. Both Meredith Sue's and Sherry's sites have more stories about our week together at Hindman, as some of you had asked for more detail than I've been able to post.

I have a Flickr slideshow with some Hindman images you haven't seen, here.

And on a related note, with more WV linkage, Rebecca Clayton now has a blog, Pocahantas County Fare, in addition to her Pocahantas County Pages and much more. I recommend particularly her piece describing how we almost lived in the "United States of Appalachia."

Correction: Sherry has just moved to Kentucky and Meredith Sue to West Virginia--while I live in blissful ignorance in the State of Confusion. Sorry, gals.

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Twernt a weed, exactly. More, a volunteer recruit from last year's garden that survived two passes with the tiller in April. This renagade sunflower got an early start and was the only garden produce worthy of the local paper's Whopper Veggie spotlight. (Click the image and see I couldn't leave well enough alone. I had to make use of my ASTONISHED expression here. Camera clicking thanks to WifeyDear.)

But there's a lesson here: get seeds in early. In the coolness of this valley and the short hours of sunlight we're given (the cost we pay for our natural air conditioning) if we don't do different than we're always done, we'll get what we've always got: a lackluster production from what should be a much better garden than it turns out to be.

Next year, the soil needs amending with lots of well-composted manure (source?); we will need to select short-season seeds; and we should start as many seeds as possible indoors, weeks ahead of setting out (get a grow-light, heat tape and set it up--where?). And we'll have to take risks and plant at the earliest possible planting date. All of this, and a break from the moles, deer, Japanese beetles, flea beetles and hail storms, drought and flooding rain, galinsoga, purselane and chickweed; and maybe next year will be better. But I wouldn't bet my next paycheck on it. Would you?

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I continue to be thoroughly amazed with Google Earth--my personal earth orbiter, high-altitude jet, hot-air balloon and hang glider. I have so many places yet to explore, and every time I visit some new place on earth, I come away with a better understanding of something other than, more than mere geography and topography. In the hands of an inquisitive mind, the combination of the earth explorer to find interesting places plus access to search engines to be able to learn about those locations--their histories, battles fought there, unique natural resources and such--can be a kind of self-guided education never before possible. If only I can translate my experience and excitement to one or two of my students next term, I will have flipped some switches and my semester will have been worthwhile.

I do plan to use the program as part of my lectures, and have links to Google Earth views in my handout notes. I will strongly encourage students to download the software to their computers. The first week of class, for instance, we'll be able to hover 200 miles off the coast of Ecuador, see the underwater terrain and the rise from the seafloor that creates the volcanic islands of the Galapagos. (The islands themselves, disappointingly, are not accessible in decent resolution to zoom in to look at their characteristic landforms.) We'll also be able to fly along the Grand Canyon and Painted Deserts when we talk about sedimentary deposits and fossils, introducing the idea of 'gradualism' proposed by Lyell, and influencing Darwin's understanding of the age of the earth and processes of fossil formation. Etc Etc.

I'll take screen captures and put them into OneNote to illustrate discussions. For instance, I just found some places in the Brazilian Rainforest where logging is eating away vast patches of forest. The process starts with a road; the one I just captured is 250 miles long. Off this, like bristles on a bottle brush, are side roads every two miles. Off these are more bristles, and off these, still more. In some places, such roads have merged so that little native legation remains. This will afford a great illustration to discuss habitat fragmentation, siltation, reduced biodiversity, increased albedo and such.

Hopefully, taking these concepts to real three dimensional places, looking at actual you-are-there images, will take these issues out of the realm of the merely academic for these sheltered, not-so-curious young people. Maybe it will help students understand the seamless connection between their home towns and other places across the world where humans and trees and birds and mammals are trying to stay alive. Maybe they will come to see the world whole. Maybe.

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It was more like a soaking tub bath. In the dark.

When I awoke at 4:00, if I'd carried through with my plan, my long pants and shirt, my rubber boots, my glasses and lawn chair would have been all laid out and ready to go. Ann wouldn't be home until after I was asleep and she should sleep this morning til at least six, so I'd just slip out the door with no turbulence at all. But instead of acting on my plan, I just went to bed last night. So getting my act together at 4 this morning was as ungraceful as a swan on roller skates. But I could see stars through our bedroom window. The Perseid Meteor Shower was waiting.

I also should have left her a note--should she wake up and find me gone--telling her I had not been abducted by aliens. "By the barn. Perseid meteors" my note would have said. As I crunched my way down the driveway, I worried the dog would see my flashlight. Even though he'd watched me leave the house out the back door, he might not figure out it was me, and commence his intruder alarm bark. Though my eyes hadn't yet adjusted to the darkness, I kept the light off, and groped my way down to the gravel road, to the crossing by the barn, and through the shallow water of the creek toting my aluminum chair, in total darkness.

The center from which these meteors would appear was to the northeast. From beside the barn, this placed my view directly over the house. As I unfolded my chair, deer snorted and stomped in the woods not far away. I was a stranger here in their world and would need a while to become comfortable and oriented in my own front yard at night. How is it possible that we live our lives asleep through such wonderment as night time under the stars?

Settling in, I listened. The shush of the creek in front of me. Dew dripping from the trees behind me. The sound of my own breathing. An acoustic landscape as spare as the visual. The deep black silhouette of the barn to my left. The irregular shape of maple trees against the lighter black of the hillside behind the house. To my right, across the pasture, the ridge's top barely distinguishable from the not-quite-black sky. How might it readjust our rhythms, our senses, our temperaments, if we spent more time immersed in this simplified aesthetic pool of night?

A passing satellite disappeared into invisible high clouds. While I could easily see the Seven Sisters and Cassiopeia, the Milky Way was washed out by humid haze so common this time of year. The Perseids is the celestial event for sissies, coming when night time temperatures aren't much of a hardship; but in August, we rarely have nights so dark you can see the Coal Sacks or the Megellanic Clouds. And so, if there were low-magnitude meteors up there this morning, I didn't see them. The six streaks I did see didn't warrant the effort to sneak out of the house so early in the dark. But the darkness did. I should be out there more often, a small speck in a sound-and-light-simplified world under Heaven's arc, listening to the quiet and the still, small voice.

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The Terror of Abundance ~ Yesterday, it was a five gallon bucket of tomatoes--"Early" Girl, finally bearing after the deer ate the tops out of them early on. The day before, the same quantity of whatever beans these are, twining all over themselves, drooping like icecicle clusters from the sunflowers. This morning, a bucket of swiss chard--five pounds pressed down so tightly I might have used my foot. The 'maters are canned; the rest, somehow, is shoehorned into the fridge, with more to come. Butternut squash lie hidden under the tropical leaves; green peppers, also deer-browsed, are bearing one or two large Dali-esque, contorted fruits. It has not been a good gardening year; but it has not been a shut-out, entirely, either--this, about what a gardener expects. Some wins, some losses. And the game goes on.

Honey Do's and Don'ts ~ We spent a good bit of yesterday sweltering in Roanoke's heat (92 there, 76 when we got home here at 3:30) We went with several destinations in mind, and ended up at some we'd have avoided if I'd kept my mouth shut. We redeemed my $25 coupon at Roanoke Natural Foods. They'd 'paid' me for an essay of mine they used in their newsletter back in the spring. From there, I let it slip, it was only a half mile to Black Dog Salvage--a remarkable place, and countless stories would come out of spending a day there among the archeology of the fifties and earlier, told in salvaged doors, statuary, and every manner of daily hardware and furniture. From all this, she found a massive stained glass arched triangle, some 4 feet tall by 5 wide. If our contractor friend thinks it will work, this will become the accent at the peak of our new room addition. (Notice I said "our"--I know when resistance is futile.) Pictures to come, perhaps.

Seasonal Safari ~ We have just returned from a walk that SHE never tires of; she refers to it as the "middle loop"--down the valley, across the creek, along the old logging road quickly becoming an overgrown footpath, and back down to the pasture. To set the scene, remember that since the bear, she is packing heat--my little Mossberg .22 rifle. It is the season of spiders. They know that a single pedestrian will make a meal for a family of spiders for a month, and they set their webs across our path about every twenty feet. This, of course, requires that one of the walkers (we've given up the idea of rigging something to the dog) has to go first, to remove the spiders that otherwise would dangle from your hatbrim, and perhaps swath you in a silken sarcophagus and have you over for dinner. Envision the scene. I had to laugh this morning. There I was, out a few paces ahead, sweeping my fan of spicebush branch up and down to clear the trail for Safari Sue, surveying the horizon, searching for wildebeest. Yes, bwana mam. Careful for anaconda!

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I reached for the desklamp just now, turned the switch and the bulb exploded. I opened my text file I use to store ideas and links for blog posts, and I had somehow deleted it--six months of backpages and future links gone. But I suppose that is only right, in a time when (oh where are you Mr. Dylan) everything is broken. Yesterday, I had to go to manual focus to capture this clearwing moth: autofocus is broken. Which reminds me...

The day before I had been standing in the mulch under the butterfly bush outside my window here, cussing my broken camera, watching the Bully Bee, hoping soon I'd see a clearwing moth, wondering if we'd see them at all this year. The dog chased butterflies along the edge of the yard, and all was well as it could be in world where Murphy and entropy are king.

Just then, a shadow rippled along the ground toward me under the maple; it mingled with the moving shadow of leaves on the ground below. It was a massive shape that I knew couldn't be the usual buzzard. Reflexively, I looked up to see the lazy flapping flight of a great blue heron just barely above the treetop. In the next instant, he would pass directly over me. How cool! But wait: what was happening? There was something drifting down through the maple leaves, passing from the silhouetted bird toward its gliding shadow below. Surely it wasn't...

Yes, it was. Still warm with bird body heat, it ran in a milky rivulet down my bare arm. But the bombing could have been a lot worse; I guess I never considered that big birds have really big cloacas (where the two excretory products mingle into an amorphous slurry.) Oh no. I dreaded to look, but yes, there too. I had lifted my camera in the first instant, though I never got it to my eye. So the skylight filter got a bath, along with my arm, under the kitchen faucet.

Beautiful creatures can be captured with a broken lens. A magnificent, awe-inspiring bird can crap on your party. Broken lightbulbs shed no light. Things fall apart. They come together--the good with the bad. And so it goes. TGIF.

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Many yellow swallowtails of Augusts will not have to worry about the season that lies ahead. They are the ones that congregate in great number at the foot of our mailbox, just where the postman's jeep tire leaves a deep rut.

They jostle and push against each other's yellow and blackness in a butterfly bar room, curling and uncurling their long sipping tubes into the wet soil where they manifest their own urgency--for a secret liquid, a nutrient, a drug, an intoxicant to dull them for what lay ahead? Who can say.

And afterward, there they lay, never in life much more than a two-dimensional being, now pressed even closer to that reduced essence when the mail man comes, as he must, rain or shine. And they stand fast in their indulgence, their flecked fragments scattered there like confetti, scattered ahead of the procession of fall, just down the road and headed this way.

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Joy! I kept my rostral gibbosity to the abrasive wheel yesterday, got my academic and writerly chores done. So today (if I hurry) I can play. Later in the day, I've been commissioned (kicking and screaming) to drive a certain wife to Roanoke to look at windows for that (unnecessary, unaffordable and outrageous) extra room project I told you about a few months back. Ignored, it hasn't gone away. (And by the way, it's okay if I'm totally honest with you about this here. Everything in the parenthesis is typed in invisible ink!)

Tsuga and I went outside yesterday afternoon to celebrate the fact that I'd actually finished something I started. It was not the signs-of-fall kind of day I was expecting during the first two weeks of August (that little teaser that reminds me why I love fall), but it was brilliantly sunny and pleasant, nonetheless--a perfect day for chasing butterfly shadows. Tsuga is watching intently here to see if one will come out of its hole--the place where the shadow disappeared into shade--near our HeresHome marker, now almost five years old. Do you remember the picture of the dog and the sign from almost two years back, when he was a pup? Here's home, indeed. What a gift to have known this place, these days. But I digress (therefore I write.)

What drew me out the front door yesterday was a self-assigned project, in which I failed. Every year at this time, the white butterfly bush outside my window swarms with tiger and spicebush swallowtails, various skippers, and a variety of bees and wasps. But what I wanted was a picture of the Bully Bee. This is my term for a large, heavy-bodied wasp with a yellow-orange abdomen who has the self-appointed task of flying round and round the bush, bumping other insects away from their feeding on the blossoms. And I can't figure out why he does this. I've never seen it capture another insect, only ram into as many as it can, and it picks on bumblebees and painted skippers alike. I've imagined it is just a grumpy old curmudgeon of an insect. I imagine hime muttering "You people get outta here. Nothing to see here. Go home where you belong and stop this infernal buzzing. How's an old man to get a nap!" I guess I'll have to bring a butterfly net from school and catch the old crank, so I can get a good look at his face and find out who the grumpy old man really is.

There was a sense of urgency yesterday--not mine but arising from a hundred seen and unseen creatures above and below me--and I think it must be the primal knowledge of the cataclysm that is fall. For so many kinds of fellow beasts, imagine what a catastrophic thing winter will be. All the grocery store shelves will be empty, the stores closed. Life rhythms for the cold-blooded slow until there is no beat at all; their blood doesn't flow, their muscles don't contract. It is the direst of emergencies, for which they are well prepared, most, to die. It is their way. Find nectar. Mate. Get fat. Lay eggs. Then either find shelter for winter, or more likely, prepare to die, having done their life-work of begetting.

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But now that our species, through our carbon-fueled pursuit of the good life, has turned up the planet's thermostat to ominous levels, it's time to break the silence. We don't have to freeze in the dark, but neither can we keep consuming as if there's no tomorrow.

So concludes a piece from the SF Chronicle that looks at a possible shift to nuclear energy as a partial solution to global warming.

France has relied on nuclear power without incident now for decades. (I don't know how they've dealt with the waste. It will be sitting somewhere and hot for millenia.) Should the US turn from coal to nuclear? Big money says so. Even some otherwise conservation-minded thinkers, like Jared Diamond and Stuart Brand, say yes.

Maybe. The risk is that if we are able to cook the books and make nuclear seem the best fix to sustain our insatiable habit for energy, this will turn money and attention away from incresing efficiency and conserving. The bottom line: we want what we've always had and more and don't want to consider anything but growth at any price. Nuclear will allow us to get by another generation, perhaps two, with our gargantuan environmental footprint. And nuclear, of course, will not power our SUV's or power shipping and commerce needs in ships, trains, and air transport.

Now, if we could just educate our 'leaders' to pronounce it before it becomes a 'hot' election issue.

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After a brief introduction on Sunday night that showed me where I would eat, where I would sleep and where I would sit for a good part of the week ahead, I didn't have enough experience of the place to know what to do with myself in the dark when I woke up at my usual 4:30 on Monday morning, the first full day at Hindman. I opened my eyes and had a waking dream that I was hiding--from what?--under my bed. Above me, a mesh of wire and metal hovered a half-arm's-length above my face, barely visible in the orange wash of hiway 160 Had I climbed under the bed on my own, or had someone--or something--put me there, I wondered as I slowly regained my mental gyroscope. Oh yeah. I'm at Hindman in a room with two sleeping roommates. I'm on the bottom bunk, the middle meat in a mattress sandwich with almost 4 hours to kill before my first cup of coffee. I barely squelched a despondent sigh.

I sat on the edge of my bed, flexed almost double by the top top bunk just above my spine. I found my sandals and shorts, grabbed my camera bag and tripod and tiptoed out of the room. Now what? A thin fog hung over the valley. Maybe it was only coal truck exhaust, it occurred to me, but it did create a certain eerie ambience slumped in the mercury vapor of downtown, a few blocks away. I spent a half hour there, struggling to find the visual story. Perhaps it had always been, would always be as I found it: half in decline, half under construction. There were ghosts there. That is all I know.

Finally, daylight; and instant moist heat, alien and by 6:30, unquiet with the hum of coal trucks. I read on the porch of the main building until almost 7:00, and walked back up the hill to my room, hoping my roomies would be awake and I could change clothes for the day. Midway, I passed a distinguished, bearded fellow I'd seen at the meeting the night before. We struck up an instant conversation, and I felt sure we would talk again. We did. Often. And with the kind of familiarity and comfort that I haven't experienced nearly as often as I'd like to in this life.

I appreciated my new friend, Lee Maynard, for his quick laugh, self-deprecating humility and for the richness of his personal story. His kindness brought me into the fold that first full day at Hindman, even though he too was a first time guest there. Only later did I discover his talents as an author. His first book, Crum, has become an Appalachian "cult classic." Here's one take on it:

Critics have compared the novel to classic coming-of-age tales Tom Sawyer and The Catcher in the Rye. The Charleston Gazette's David Peyton calls the book "brilliantly written, carefully crafted, and downright funny. Most of all, it is real." Meredith Sue Willis, who writes the Introduction to the new edition of the novel from West Virginia University's Vandalia Press, writes "Each time I read Lee Maynard's Crum, I ask myself why this foul-mouthed, sexist, scatological, hillbilly-stereotyping novel is one of my favorites." Her answer to that question explores the honesty of Maynard's prose, the complexity of his thoughts, and the honesty of his portrayals of young people coming of age and growing out of the box where they've been planted. link

I was happy to find this NPR "Driveway Moment" with Lee, interviewed by Terry Gross. It will help me remember Lee's voice, so that when I read Crum (my copy is still in KY--my roommate carried it home by mistake) I will be able to hear his sonorous and thoroughly genuine voice in it, all the way through. His second book--about his life after leaving Crum--is Running with the Cannibals. I'm saving it for Thanksgiving break.

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Well, turkeysquat. I had a full head of steam, replying to Melinama's email request for more talk about Hindman. She identified with my approach-avoidance, and I was weighing in with both fists, telling her as how I didn't think the topic would find a very broad interest among Fragments readers. And Dear Wife distracted me from my epistle; when I went back to yahoo mail, the message had disappeared. So, if I have to type the blame thing again, you're gonna git an earful whether you want it or not. So just sit down and hursh.

(I notice it is much easier to slip into localisms after being with a crowd of enlightened persons from the hills who remain true to their native tongue. I haven't picked up the nice white light ((no E in the sound at all, only the long drawling I sound)) from Rita or Silas or others; but it wouldn't have taken long.)

Melinama particularly called out this passage from the other day's Fragment:

"It was much as I had expected it as far as the tension I had anticipated between wanting to join in and wanting to stay in my own space; between wanting to be family and feeling like an intruding visitor."

I don't think most people could tell it in settings like the writers workshop, but I dread sitting through conversations that bore me, ignore me, or make me talk when I'd rather listen or leave. By Thursday, I found myself less able to chitchat, less prone to seek out a little cluster of folks before breakfast. After the Thursday night program, though I tried--joining folks on the front porch, feeling distant, leaving going back to my room, coming back down to try again--I was burned out. I felt alienated. I got it in my head that those who had seemed to have enjoyed me company were as tired of me as I was--not of them, but of the social obligations that made us look so hard for common ground. I experienced a mild paranoia born of sheer heat exhaustion, small talk burn out, and a distance from my own thoughts I am so used to on Goose Creek.

And far too few of those thoughts left my head, I realized. The week was in that way unsatisfying and disappointing. I listened, formally during daily programs, informally at meals and elsewhere, to what others had written. There was some wonderful, inspiring stuff. I knew them better having heard their voice through their writing. Not one written word of mine saw the light of day. No one heard about my weblog, my dog, our place in Floyd and our lives here. Only a very few saw a few of my photographs or heard of the importance of photography to my creative life. I remained invisible for a week when I had hoped to have a say, at least a little. Other than insipid journal notes, I came home from Hindman with three paragraphs of new writing. That's all. And I am partly to blame, and partly can claim ignorance. There were slots for participants to read each day from 4 til 5:15. I didn't know about this signup sheet until all the slots were filled. And I did not attend any of them. I suppose, without consciously acknowledging it or even thinking about it til now, this was my way of keeping my distance if I couldn't bridge it through the voice of my writing, openly, publicly.

But make no mistake about it: for someone who aspires to know better both his purpose as a writer and his roots as an Appalachian writer, Hindman was about as good as it's gonna get. And I have promised myself this: I WILL go back next year IF I am able to produce a 'significant' manuscript before next summer. I will expect to be able to have excellent one-on-one attention toward getting it completed and published. And secondly, I will get my name on that signup sheet before I unpack the car on day one.

Next year, too, I will have my bearings by the first hour; I'll start off having family ties I had to nurture this time, with so much effort and energy. And I'll be a year older and more focused--at least the first part of that is incontrovertibly true.

Posted by fred1st at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Easy as making a Peanut Butter Sandwich, hence the name.

Thankfully, through my contact with Ecotone of years past, the wiki was familiar to me. Some are vastly complex. This one, as Goldilocks said, is JUST RIGHT!

I'm tinkering with ways to make my Biology 103 course material available to students this year, after cussing and kicking with WebCT last year and vowing 'never again.' After toying with a blogger.com blog (here), and thinking perhaps to use a public page in BackPackIt (here)--both of which may have their usefulness later in the semester--I've just yesterday discovered and committed to use this free and simple wiki as a means of building student-accessible course material for the coming term.

Unlike the blog format, my 'biowiki' (still barely more than the foundation poured there so far) will allow collateral pages to be set up with amazing ease.

After the semester gets cranking, a student who's missed a few days checking the page can simply click the "recent changes" link and see what has been added where. Or you can go to the "all pages" link and see basically a site index quickly.

I'll be the sole owner of the wiki (many are collaborative with many authors) and use the blog to post discussion questions to which all students can respond using comments.

Will they use this resource? If they want access to lecture notes and assignments, yes, I think they'll bookmark it right away as I suggest, and use it regularly. I'm looking forward to learning more about how to make full use of the program. I strongly suggest you give PBWiki a look--no matter what you do online. And if you download it, tell'em Fred sent you. I'd love a free upgrade to the Premium Package!

Posted by fred1st at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the time of year the yellowjackets get nasty. They find holes in the ground (thank you very much, army of Goose Creek moles, voles and chipmunks) where they build nests like crazy, getting ready for winter. This obviously puts them in a foul mood at about the time I'm out scouting for firewood. They hate it when I pass within a hundred yards of one of their holes carrying my chainsaw. They'll nail me for sure in the coming weeks, and I'm far more cautious about watching for them than for snakes. Dang snakes won't chase you all the way back to your truck; or get down your britches leg.

Now I've been stung by lots of venomous athropods: fire ants and hornets, paper wasps and sweat bees. And I'd have thought yellowjacket stings rated right near the top for pain. Not so, according to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index that rates 'jackets about midways up the scale. I'll reproduce it for those of you too lazy to click over to wikipedia:

• 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
• 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of Hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
• 4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).
• 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.

At first glance, you might think we're judging wines: light, ephemeral almost fruity? I like his similes: WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue. Hydrochloric acid on a paper cut. That's good.

I'm going to use this for a class discussion early on. Every one of my students will have been stung. They can't sit their passively as if this isn't relevant. And in the process, maybe I can sneak some biology into their brains.

Take the Pepsis Wasp (Tarantula Hawk) for instance. There's lots of interesting biology in their prey preferences, hunting techniques, behavior and the relationship between their anatomy and their lifestyle--between form and function--that we can draw from this single wikipedia page.

And the take-home lesson: don't whine when you get zapped by a few measly yellow jackets. You could have encountered 100% more pain if you'd got into a mess of Bullet Ants. (South and Central America. No sightings yet on Goose Creek.)

Posted by fred1st at 7:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Wonderful news! Only 296 million Americans will not receive the recently-successful vaccine touted by Toni Fauci over the weekend. That means that less than half of a percent of our population may be protected from the H5N1 bird flu! That is, if the tested doses are actually strong enough for the flu virus that hits the streets. And of course, you have to realize that the tested antivirus may well be ineffective against a mutated virus six months or two years from now. It's a shame that it will so expensive to produce (can't use chicken eggs as chicken tissue is fatmeat for this virus) that, should it be produced in adequate volume and in time to be an effective preventative (two highly iffy conditional clauses) much of the eastern European and Russian populations couldn't afford to pay for it. Pardon my sarcasm. It covers my disappointment.

I saw the headline, my hopes lifted. I read the analysis and saw what I expected. Spin.

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This is a lazy conceit, a self-interview that I had with myself on the way home. It lasted most of four hours, by which time both the interviewer and the interviewee were sick of each other's voice and face. I trust they are still speaking to each other.

What were your first impressions of the new country you traveled through between Abingdon and Hindman, and of Hindman itself?

I had already "flown" the route in Google Earth before I left the house a week ago today. I knew pretty much when to look for the transition between geologies, and it was apparent when I reached the southern edge of coal country starting in Wise County. With that change, there was a transition in the course of creeks and roads, a decline in flat land and less open sky. It soon became apparent, too, the fact that King Coal is no longer a merry ol' soul. While abandoned businesses along the roads might only be slightly greater in number than in other parts of the region, they are conspicuous because the lay of the land forces everything down to the bottoms of valleys where the roads are. The boom has gone to bust--a boom that created lots of jobs even as it fouled the water and the air, dis-eased the hills with the rumble of dynamite and endless coal trucks. The present and future of southeast Kentucky has been changed forever by its past.

I had a speculative moment on the way up, and this is what I wondered:

What if...in the region we call Kentuck and West Virginia, the coal formations of the Carboniferous era were thousands of feet deeper than they are today, or non-existant. What would the economy, the environment and the culture of these places be like today? Would they be retirement meccas, people flocking to the sheltering hollers among unspoiled nature?

What if...in the region known as the Blue Ridge where I live, it had been discovered two hundred years ago that granite and quartz could be used as fuel to create steam to convert to power to make money? This area would have suffered a like fate to today's 'national sacrifice areas' in KY and WV. What, then, would our economy, our ecology be like, with the tops of our mountains chewed away, our clear streams choked with 'overburden.'

Regarding Hindman, I went with totally groundless expectations: that it would be cool; that it would be serene and quiet; that it would be rural and set apart; that it would be at all like the other settlement school I attended--the JC Campbell Folk School in North Carolina.

It was not cool. And I should have expected this. If I go back to the distribution maps for any creature, plant or animal, I'm most likely to find that a northern creature's range dips south along the Appalachian ridges where it is cooler than surrounding lowlands. I remembered this when I got out of my car and stepped on a sweetgum ball and ten feet later, ran across another southern weed I haven't seen since I left Alabama. Hindman is north of Floyd, but its weather is far more southern.

It was not quiet and tucked away. Driving down the busy Hiway 160, I knew I was approaching the 'town' of Hindman. Suddenly, there was the sign "Hindman Settlement School." I expected in my fantacies of the place to drive down a winding shady lane to the campus, but it was only as far as the other side of a short bridge over Troublesome Creek from the highway. I sat alone in the cool fog the first morning before daylight, listening to the sinister hum of coal trucks, five and six at a time. If there would be peace and serenity here, I knew, it would have to come from inside, out. And Troublesome Creek sounds much more picturesque than it, in fact, is. Almost all the water in eastern Kentucky is polluted by acid runoff from the mines.

It was not like Campbell. The campus rooming and food were adequate but not quaint or memorable. The ambience was more rigid and management more authoritarian. And for the week of the writers workshop, the group of 80-some-odd attendees were there for one sole purpose of writing. Campbell, you'd sit at table with folks taking woodworking, glass blowing, blacksmithing, pottery or nature writing. There was both good and bad in the homogeneity of purpose.

It was much as I had expected it as far as the tension I had anticipated between wanting to join in and wanting to stay in my own space; between wanting to be family and feeling like an intruding visitor. But perhaps more about this later.

Posted by fred1st at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Egads! Not a single picture in the front page entries of Fragments. And I (sometimes) call this a photoblog!

This is what happens after all the formal meetings of the day have ended at the Hindman Writers Workshop. A few with instruments and many with voices gather somewhere--here, on the front porch of the building that houses both the dining room and the auditorium--for some impromptu singing: old gospel songs; Carter Family; traditional Appalachian ballads derived from centuries-old Scottish epics; and anything that strikes the fancy of the person holding forth. Silas House launched into Gillan Welch's Orphan Girl, and we sang right along. Also picking up the guitar far too infrequently was Ricky Cox, a fellow Floyd native (there were THREE of us at Hindman this year!) I'd give my eye teeth for a copy of the lyrics of his "Hooked on Phonics"--a song of mock-addiction he wrote some time ago, but timeless in its homespun pun and wit.

On the night pictured here--and the core of the music most nights--was Rita Quillen and Jason Howard (on the autoharp.) Jason is the 24 year old editor of Equal Justice Magazine and was my wee-hours room mate who came to bed about the time I got up. Rita, I met first at the Radford Highland's workshop in 2003 where she shared the staffing with Jack Higgs. While she is under-represented on the web relative to her prominence in the hall of great Appalachian personalities and writers, this is just what I would have expected. Her grace and humility set her apart as much as her poetry and long association with the top tier of artists in her craft.

Posted by fred1st at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The trip north and west to Hindman Kentucky took me less than four and a half hours on Sunday. I took one wrong turn going up--somewhere near Jenkins--and had to backtrack maybe two miles. This wasn't too bad, I thought, for a can't get there from here trip, a first venture into the varicose back roads of Kentucky. (Roads, I'll admit, were better than I had expected, mostly four lane.) The real marvel is that I only had one navigating mistake retracing my route home yesterday.

I will not hesitate to tell you: my mind was on a thousand other things than driving. While the submerged self snorkeled in a sea of Hindman thought and memory, my face bobbed above the surface only now and then for a gulp of real world orientation. The inner robot, my reflexive navigator somehow got me home.

The land transformed in the reverse order of my going north for the first time, farther and farther into unknown and unfamiliar terrain of slatey hillocks of coal country. Each mile south yesterday between Hindman and Abingdon, the landscape morphed more and more back into the familiar green-folded valleys that are the fingerprints of southwest Virginia. I was coming home.

I hoped we'd had rain while I was gone, and the anvil-topped thunderhead I could see to the east some thirty miles toward Floyd County gave me hope. It was mighty hot, and not a drop had fallen the week we sweltered at the Settlement School sequestered in air conditioned bunkers. I glanced at the dashboard thermometer: 91 degrees. Then somewhere past Dublin, the sun disappeared behind the vertical storm cloud.

As I passed the crest of the New River valley proper headed toward the long bridge across the long river, the temperature plummeted in one mile to 66 degrees. Uh-oh, I thought. That thunderhead means business. Fat drops plopped, stopped and started again a half-dozen times before it threw down with genuine wrath.

I kept my focus on the flashing lights of the blue moving van in front of me, while a hundred cars pulled off to the shoulders, north and southbound, for every quarter mile we traveled. Sissies. I followed the rooster tail of the van when it left the canal of interstate into the rest area near exit 109. I dozen briefly, seat laid back, in the rest area parking lot, pelted by hail as the trees flurried and thrashed. So. The storms of life return, I thought. I have come down from bean stalk land. Hope the garden is getting some of this.

At last, I pull off Daniels Run and plunge into the furrow fashioned by Goose Creek. I'll be home in five minutes! Rounding the bend, I see the garden is full of weeds. Even from the road, I can tell we've had no rain; the tomato leaves are curled and brown. Ann is at work. The dog greets me in passing, then obsessively studies the Subaru that she usually drives, thinking she will be getting out of it as she usually does, handing him a treat of left-over sandwich scraps. So: I'm only as good as my gifts, eh?

I set down my camera bag, computer and suitcase--all black, very business-like--and see that notes are taped to the kitchen faucet and to some water-filled canning jars nearby. "Water pressure out this morning." Entropy, I mutter. Welcome home.

When I wasn't thinking lyrical thoughts on the way home, two things filled my mind's eye like that carrot dangling just out of reach: a cold beer, and a hot shower. One out of two would have to do. But first, I called a neighborhood electrician: it's probably not an electrical matter, he said. Then I called the well-driller folks, and at 5:30 on a Friday, talked to their machine. The return call an hour later told me "Monday, at the earliest." Oy.

She won't like this: bird baths before work both Saturday and Sunday. I filled up some buckets with water from the well spigot so we could at least flush the toilets. And first thing when she walks in the door, she scolds me because the buckets aren't as clean as she deems necessary for going into the toilet tank. Hello? And I remember it is just this gritty kind of niggling minutia that make up the intercourse of ordinary life. I feel the heat of re-entry into the heavier air of real life and wince.

And so I am fully down the bean stalk again. Back in Kansas. I've stumbled and plumped down the ladder from the rarified air of the ivory towers where the Appalachian literati live. I've fallen clumsily back into the mundane world of weeds where things fall apart. It is good to be here where I belong. This is my coffee cup I hold in my hand. This is my chair. My computer. My weblog. Sigh.

Update, 10:00: Must have had lightning run in the wiring. There's a dooflatchie inside a thingamajig that has burn marks beside it and the end's blown off. The nice people at Rorrer Well Drilling in Blacksburg (COMMERCIAL PLUG!) are coming out to replace it. I'd already set three milkjugs of water to warm in the sunshine for my nekit-as-a-jaybird bird bath out behind the house later this morning. Heck, I may do that anyway, and take a real shower (or two) later on!

Posted by fred1st at 5:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

These are the last hours at Hindman. It will be hard to leave, it will be good to see and feel Goose Creek again. I have so much to think about, to learn from what has happened here. Only a very small part of that will translate into this little box on Moveable Type.

I've managed to survive quite nicely now for six days without being able to google every stray curiosity that comes to mind. Haven't had even a taste of ETOH all week, though some of my classmates went across the county line and brought back contraband mixed with Coke. I haven't written much, and the dam can't hold it back much longer.

I miss the blog and those who come into my home, into my life through Fragments. I regret I wasn't able to talk very much about the role of the weblog in the life of a writer. It is so important. At least for me. But now I know I must--I must--blog less and write more. I've known this for months. Now, I'll have to put legs on it. Finding that balance between being known, and knowing my own mind and thoughts--it is a difficult tension, but necessary, now.

I'll be back in the saddle tomorrow, and thankful for it. I've been away a thousand miles and a thousand conversations.

Posted by fred1st at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Fragmented. Pleasantly fragmented. If conversation--from before breakfast until long after supper--burns calories, there'll be little left when I get home to Goose Creek. It only gets worse (in a most wonderful way) the more folks I meet and with whom I find common ground, or new ground altogether. We are all bound to words, we are all bound to these mountains. After feeling a 'rank stranger' for the first day (as I had expected), I am feeling a part of this family reunion.

Access to the internet isn't easy and the connection speed reminds of 28K modem days. But I guess it doesn't really matter. I wouldn't be able to get in a 'blogging' state of mind if I had DSL from my room. Thanks for emails that keep me feeling connected to that other life I can still recall on the banks of Goose Creek--so far away, never out of memory.

The week has been so very full. I'm especially finding resonance with the memoir class, which I audit each morning after my 'enrolled' non-fiction class. There is an Appalachian Literature "class" from 1:15 to 2:30 each day, followed by participant readings at 4 and staff readings at 7:00. So far, there has been music on one porch or another from 9:30 until. Not much time for writing, or even processing--a personal debriefing that will go on for weeks after I return.

Well, the sorry ergonomics of this library workstation is taking its toll, so I'll end. I'm looking forward to sharing vignettes of Hindman, and to where this very rich experience leads me. See you soon! -- Fred

Posted by fred1st at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)