Fragments From Floyd

As the story goes, the 19 year old Jeff Biggers hitched a ride with a trucker who promptly put him out when he made jokes about hillbillies.

"I'm a hillbilly, too," young Biggers added.

"We don't use that word anymore," the man replied. But he offered to take Biggers to the Appalachian South Folklife Center in West Virginia so the young man could learn the truth about mountain culture. There, Biggers met the center’s founder, poet and activist Don West, who told him, "You can't understand America until you understand Appalachia." The young man spent ten years attempting to do just that, and his latest book is the result. From Amazon.com:

The word Appalachia is seldom uttered in the same sentence with the word enlightenment. More likely, images of the film Deliverance, corncob chomping grannies, or bonafide gun-toting hillbillies come to mind. However, in truth, Appalachia has been a cradle of US freedom, independence, and enlightenment, as well as a region of progressive social history, literature, and music.

The United States of Appalachia reveals to us how so many of our nation's basic freedoms and founding moments grew out of the Appalachias. From the first declaration of independence to the beginnings of folk music, literature, and poetry, Jeff Biggers illuminates with humor, intelligence, and clarity, the many reasons why we all need a lesson in Appalachian history.

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Yesterday, with a light fog and a heavy frost, was the first morning in far too long that I've 'lost myself' in the moment by moment birth of a new day. But even though an experience like this is wonderful and memorable, there is seldom a single subject for the lens to settle on, and images like this one are gathered for the sake of remembering the light--the feel of it, the quiet energy, that will bring back to the photographer the sound of water drops falling as frost melted in the first rays. This kind of image is to bring back the being there, with the emphasis more on being and less on there. Click image for larger view.

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Headline this morning: Canadian gets bird flu in Turkey

That sounds like an interesting early morning coffee-sipping browse. And oddly enough, the piece in the Toronto Star is written engagingly as a second person narrative. One assumes as you read along that the 'you' in the piece is actually the author's experience. He touched a shovel found near a chicken coup in Turkey to dig his car out of a ditch. He was quarantined in a Turkish hospital. He landed in Toronto with worsening flu-like symptoms.

Then you reach the end of the piece, and nothing. No resolution, no attribution of the voice of the piece, no confirmation or denial of there having been a sick Canadian aboard a jet landing in Toronto--which is rather important news for those who flew with him.

If a fictional account, it should be labeled as such. Though written in an interesting way, if factual, it is sadly lacking the objective facts one expects from the press. Maybe the whole thing is just the author's too-vivid imagination. And funny I should read not moments later about James Frey's 'million little problems' because of his dishonest 'memoir.'

Yes, we need the diversion of fiction. But we need to know when fact is only masquerading as such. Truth. Or consequences.

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Read as: Laissez faire in the public domain. National Parks changes in permissable use hits pretty close to home as the nation's longest national park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, forms the southern border of our county.

The Blue Ridge Gazette raises the alarm on this issue. Give the matter some thought if you don't want four-wheelers on your favorite trail in the Smokies.

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We had joined a hundred strangers gathered for music at the Oak Grove Pavillion behind the Lutheran Church. One hundred strangers to us, but friends and neighbors to each other. We wondered then if the time would ever come that we wouldn't feel on the outside of such gatherings. Would we come someday to a public gathering like this and know and be known? That was in the summer of 1997.

Ann and I both had remembered this loneliness by contrast to the feeling of belonging Saturday night. We knew about half of the folks at the house concert and were part of the larger conversation that is community. Great thing is, we didn't know half of them. There are so many more friends and neighbors we've yet to meet.

A house concert is a unique experience for most performers used to playing in restaurants or pubs where their music is mere background. The home setting by contrast is a small, private concert where every ear is on every note. I think it quite took the New Roanoke Jug Band by surprise to have the full attention of their audience. They rose to the occasion.

My only regret: that I didn't climb the hill behind the house while the band played on. But I can see it there below me. The white farm house under the Milky Way, golden light streaming from the windows. Shadows move to the tempo of the music of fiddle and bow--in all the empty cosmos, the music of the spheres among friends.

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The new room moves along in lurches. Yesterday, windows delivered, and the door that Ann doesn't like after all, seen in the flesh--or vinyl, as it were. Windows on the door are dinky and it will have to go back. The contractor has other jobs he's juggling and we've (mercifully) not heard the attendant banging and drilling that goes with home-moaner's progress. There are still unmade decisions, coming to a head very soon.

Regarding the heat for the room, which will have a cathedral ceiling 12 feet at the peak: unvented gas, I had thought, til I read some bad press on the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning. We have a 30K BTU 4-eye wall unit we use sparingly in the great room, and never noticed any smell or air quality problems with that in six years. But this little rock in the shoe makes the heater choice a harder one to make.

The room will have a concrete pad for or under the floor. Whether concrete will be our surface remains to be seen. Without a pattern etched in it (that will also catch dirt) will it be slippery underfoot? We plan to have area rugs most places people will walk. And I think we did decide to add pigment before it is poured, so if it shows, that's okay. But that needs to be decided soon.

I added just a few more pictures to the gallery. The unfinished product sure isn't much to look at. But then, we've seen this whole house in intensive care, and seen it come through the surgery transformed and holding our lives in a most pleasant way. The new room will eventually feel the same way. Eventually.

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"Rather than wait for Federal action to reduce the greenhouse gases (GHG) that are causing climate change, it's time for people everywhere to take action at the grassroots level. The Cool It! Campaign – a joint project of Acterra, the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club, and 3 Phases Energy – offers you a new way to address this growing problem.

You can use the Cool It! calculator to identify your personal CO2 emissions, learn about how to reduce them, and purchase renewable energy certificates (green tags) to offset your remaining emissions." link

My emissions of GHG? It's not that hard to figure out. Just enter your energy details (gas mileage, electricity use, air miles, etc) in the quick Carbon Calculator.

Hmmm. By way of the Green Tags, our money can work toward a solution to the degree to which we contribute to the problem. We can become agents for change even before alternatives (other than the very significant conribution of conservation) are available to let us reduce our personal GHG emissions. I'm sure this is not a perfect plan, but it seems a step in the right direction. See also Bringing Global Warming Home.

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While other pathogens-du-jour try to figure out how to be fruitful and multiply in the face of human antibodies and pharmaceutical antibiotics, some of these bugs have been around the block a time or two, and pretty well have survival figured out--their survival at our expense, and too often, the youngest among us go first.

One we don't hear much about in the temperate zones (under past climate regimes, at least) is the mosquito-borne malaria. It still kills a million people every year, 700,000 of them under the age of five. That's not good.

What's worse is that "the world's last effective drug to treat malaria, artemisinin, is in danger of losing its potency because of improper use, putting millions of lives in peril, the World Health Organization warned yesterday. The WHO urged drug companies to stop selling the drug in its misused form."

Turns out, once again, that plants come to the rescue--one called artemisia, from China.

Compared with other antimalaria drugs, artemisinin works much faster, killing the parasites and staying in the blood stream for only four to eight hours. The other drugs used in combination attack whatever parasites have evaded artemisinin. But when artemisinin is used by itself, those parasites that stay alive can develop resistance.

For poor people needing treatment, the single-drug artemisinin pill is more attractive economically, costing roughly half the price of the combination drugs, which are sold for $1 to $2 per course of treatment. Much cheaper still is chloroquine, which costs about a dime for the entire treatment, but only cures roughly half of malaria cases in many countries because of widespread resistance. link

So it ultimately comes down to hard choices for the poor. Think of what one day's worth of war costs could do for a million children. Nah. Don't think about it.

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"When winter comes, our morning walks don't end, but they are no longer a casual tiptoe through the woods. Winter walks are a deep-sea dive into cold and dark, in a submersible of wool and down. Peeking out from toboggans like diving helmets, we trudge heavily against the stern and biting currents of polar air that washes like waves over us. Without our encumbering spacesuits our frail pink flesh would turn blue and brittle as December leaves, and our expedition would never be heard from again."

This is a paragraph from a fragment from three winters ago. And I have decided NOT to make any changes, even though perhaps only those of the southern persuasion will understand: a toboggan is a knit cap.

No, says my son, after living north a few years. It's a tuque, he tells me on his first visit back to Virginia from Vancouver. Say what? I had to decide: tuque or toboggan. Here's the take on tuque (pronouced took with the vowel sound as in fool, for those what have never heard such a word:

A tuque (Canadian French: tuque, also spelled toque in English) is a knitted hat, originally usually of wool though now often of synthetic fibers, that is designed to provide warmth in winter. Sometimes considered Canada's national hat, all tuques are tapered and brimless, and they are often topped with pompons.

The word tuque is not etymologically related to the name of the chef's toque, although tuque is usually spelled "toque" (though still pronounced /tuk/) by assimilation. The word is also commonly misspelled "touque".

During the 1837 Patriotes Rebellion a red tuque became a symbol of French-Canadian nationalism, a symbol that was briefly revived by the Front de libération du Québec in the 1970s.

Today some consider tuques to be somewhat lacking in sophistication, though they are indispensable in cold climates. The most famous media characters to sport this kind of hat are the SCTV characters, Bob and Doug McKenzie. Michael Nesmith of The Monkees also wore this hat in his television series.

In the United States, this type of hat is usually referred to as a knit hat, knit cap, sock cap, watch cap or stocking cap, and sometimes as a ski hat. In the southern United States, it is sometimes called a toboggan.

A beanie is a similar type of hat, although tuque and beanie can be synonymous in California.

There is also a town known as La Tuque, Quebec, named after a nearby hill that resembles a tuque. link

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"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy." - Wendell Berry

BERGER: It seems like it always comes back eventually to the individual's choice. Does one choose to live in an economy of grace, based on generosity, or in an economy of scarcity based on acquisition?

BERRY: You have to realize that people are working very hard to remove that choice, to make it impossible to make such a choice. And they can do that simply by putting the land entirely under corporate control. It can happen. We're pretty well advanced into a corporate or capitalist totalitarianism. And it's a very strange thing to see happen, because we were lately so much afraid of communist totalitarianism. You can remove that choice we were talking about simply by making it impossible for small economic enterprises to survive. Link

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I'm going through the junk drawer that Fragments has become, looking for pieces that might fit this jigsaw puzzle of a book. At the same time, of course in all this digging into the past while returning to past professions in the present, I'm wondering what it is that I do for a living, and why. In all that ruminating and digging, I came across this little tale that seems appropriate regarding the W word.

The world of work has become something I watch from the outside these days. I'll dive back in if the right job comes along. But by the time you reach my age, you know that no matter how good a job looks before you start it, there will be days when you'll need hip waders for mucking around in the barnyard bog most jobs eventually become. I remember when our son, Nathan, was 5 years old, a precocious reader, and eagerly vocal in large groups. He understood what I'm saying here about work. Let me explain.

We were gathered for a meal on the eve of the relocation of a friend and co-worker. A dozen or so friends of the soon-to-be former associate were coming to the end of our last meal together at the Chinese Restaurant in the small Virginia town where we lived. It was time for the fortune cookies.

We went around the table reading our predictable mock-Confusian fortunes. You know the routine. The reading came round the table to young Nathan, who insisted that he would take his turn, and no help here, thank you. He started out with relative ease:
"Your....wor...working....life....will be...fi....filled..."

Here he paused briefly with a furrowed brow. He was stumped by a word he didn't know, but we had worked some with him on phonics (although he was not hooked) and he was determined to make a stab at it. By this time, the entire restaurant crowd was silent, marveling at the reading acumen and general cuteness of this plucky, extroverted little fat-cheeked chap.

"Your working life will be filled...with...(and he completed the sentence loudly in triumph)... EXCREMENT!"

Everybody in the place cracked up! We could hardly catch our breath! It was just too perfect. And was even funnier when we reached over and read that his cookie fortune actually ended with the word EXCITEMENT! Way to go, Nate. You were wise before your time. Out of the mouths of babes.

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Me? No, not much. We have left it thrice over: from living in a metropolis by moving to a small town; by moving from the small town to a rural community where we could see a few of our neighbors' houses; and finally by moving from a rural neighborhood to a neighborless wilderness where the only noise we hear is our own and the creeks'. That the urban world is eating itself up in asphalt and excess is seldom in our faces or on our minds. We've turned our hearts from it, because it is hideous and makes us sad. But look at it we must.

I seldom order a book on impulse, but I just Amazon One-click ordered the one from which the following excepts are taken (thanks to Orion Magazine.) When something makes you laugh and that laugh ends with a tear, its author has hit you at your core. This hits mine. Excepts don't do justice. Please read it all and One Click the book for yourself.

My generation is weighed down by a sadness we do not know we feel. The promise was whispered melodiously in our ears sometime after the enjoyment of the great treasures beneath the TV dinner's foil and before the deep velvet of sleep in our soft, footed pajamas. The delivery, we have discovered by now, is not as we were pledged. The disparity is so geologic that we risk our necks attempting to view the whole towering thing. The velocity of change has picked up a bit: no longer can we disregard it as some crumbling old history. What is lost was here just thirty or forty years ago, and thus it is written all over the pages of your life. But still you don't know what can be done. Each announcement comes wrapped in its own fait accompli: this going, this coming, look out, look away, cry alone, it's done.

... Those old farms bearing new billboards of what's to come: forty huge houses of Frankensteinian architecture unmoored from any landscape to float just above its treelessness. Your ancient mountaintop a resort and vacation homes. That Beaux Arts post office a Popeyes Chicken and Biscuits. This revered battlefield fertilized with men's blood a shopping center. The dirt road paved. The paved road once two lanes, now four; once four, now six. The crossroads with no light gets its signal. The march of time keeps marching, the army bigger every day.

Nostalgists? Maybe. But there were good ol' days and good ol' places and I wonder if we should give them up without a fight.

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Okay, maybe I'll go ahead since MyPublisher has offered two for the price of one.

A thoughtful reader sent me the link to MyPublisher a while back and I downloaded the free book making software. I felt with this it wouldn't be that hard to put together a little book of images-plus-text that might give me a better idea of the look and feel of a larger, more polished project of this kind.

I now have a little book with 21 images, each accompanied by a short passage from Fragments prose over the years. Today, without anguishing over the thing being perfect (though I do need to spellcheck and such one more time) I'll place my order for the softcover book--Blue Ridge Seasons--for about $10, get two, keep one, give the other away and see if this inspires me to take the next step.

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This weekend, we'll hear music in Floyd County without visiting the 'music mile' on Floyd's * Main Street for music. The New Roanoke Jug Band is playing a 'house concert' where more than the invited couple of dozen folks could pitch the hosts' two-story farmhouse right over onto its side.

But it won't be long before the Friday Night Jamboree spreads outdoors where the pickup bands and dancers play freely and for free. I look forward to carrying the camera again to see if I can do a better job of capturing the true flavor of being there. The lighting is a challenge, quarters are very close (and hot in summer) and there is more motion than you'd want to stop with the camera, even if you could.

I've just put some Jamboree images in a little gallery. Thought you might want to stop by for a visit to * Main Street, Floyd VA.

NOTE: * Technically, it's Locust Street, the north-south route through town. But Locust doesn't alliterate so well with Music as Main.

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We passed the continental US peak of oil production some time back; there are more of us now; we use more energy per capita than ever, and we cannot wean from our oil dependence. We're planning to dirty-bomb our air and water with thirty years of accelerated coal burning for electricity. There's plenty of coal in the National Sacrifice Areas of several eastern states. But what will we do for oil to power our cars, transport our essentials and energy-subsidize our agriculture? Voila: we are sitting on a motherlode of 'oil shale.' But what exactly is this stuff, and where?

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, half of the planet’s oil shale lies within 150 miles of Grand Junction, Colorado. The shale is contained in the Green River Formation, which is famous for its wonderful fossils, imprints of sycamore leaves, dragonflies, extinct birds, crocodiles, and strange fish which lived in ancient lakes. These thick layers of shale were created by a million-year drizzle of fine clay and dying algae. The energy in oil shale is preserved pond scum, algal ooze.

The term 'oil shale' is a misnomer. The rock is a marlstone, the hydrocarbon a waxy molecule called kerogen. Kerogen is a proto-petroleum, an energy-wannabe. Oil and gas are generated when kerogen is exposed to heat deep in the Earth’s oven. If the Green River Formation had been buried deeper, time would have cooked the kerogen into petroleum. But since it wasn’t buried deeper, to extract energy from these rocks, you have to put them back in the oven and supply the heat Nature failed to furnish during fifty million years. link

But is it feasible to extract this stuff and should we expect this to solve our mounting shortfall of domestic oil? link:

Probably not. Its energy load is very low. Oil shale is said to be "rich" when a ton yields 30 gallons of oil. An equal weight of granola contains three times more energy.

But there's a net energy yield, right? Well, sort of. Look at this in-situ project proposed by Shell oil:

...it requires a mind-boggling amount of electricity. To produce 100,000 barrels per day, the company would need to construct the largest power plant in Colorado history. Costing about $3 billion, it would consume 5 million tons of coal each year, producing 10 million tons of greenhouse gases. (The company's annual electric bill would be about $500 million.) To double production, you'd need two power plants. One million barrels a day would require 10 new power plants, five new coal mines. And 10 million barrels a day, as proposed by some, would necessitate 100 power plants.

Could oil shale production be done in an ecologically wise way with no lasting effects on Colorado?

The DOE casually dedicates all of western Colorado's surplus water to oil shale, proposes enormous open-pit mines 2,000 feet deep, and advocates retorting up to 6 billion tons of shale each year. That's twice the tonnage of all coal mined in the U.S. and China. This is not a vision, it is a nightmare.

Given these costs to benefits, consider: US oil shale may produce 100,000 barrels of oil a day in ten years. But the nation currently consumes that much oil every seven minutes. Improving the efficiency of our automobiles by 2 miles per gallon would save 10 times as much fuel, saving consumers $100 billion at the pump.

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Thanks (again) to my friend from California, I have a recipe for turning color images into woodcut graphics. I confess I got stopped about half way through the 25 step process because just the earliest steps--plus some find-then-fade edges and other tweaks--give me results approximating what I had in mind. I'll post some of these as I go.

What I don't know is all the details about how professional printers deal with grayscale and such. I know it's complicated, but I also know it can be done.

I'll need to settle on somebody to work with for printing (when-if the MS ever gets to that stage) and then they can walk me though getting images ready to plug into the text.

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The column (in the Floyd Press) this week begins with a journal entry from January, 2003. I thought it was worth a look both back and ahead from this warm week in the middle of winter to see what we might expect of an unpredictable calendar of weather in Floyd County.

In downtown Floyd, the street is outlined in cinders and salt, marking where the gray mounds of snow have finally vanished. The January Thaw this week has sent flake and crystal down the city drains, heading now for Little River, and from thence north through the New, and the Kanawha and Ohio, then looping back south to the Gulf of Mexico where they will retire on a beach, with a sweet orange drink in a tall frosted glass with a saffron paper parasol. Meanwhile, a few short-sleeved human types busy themselves in the tiny heart of town on this warm January day, finding excuses to step outdoors onto the solid and temporarily dry surfaces of sidewalks in the comfortable afternoon. They greet their neighbors before the real winter comes on the heels of these brief days of duplicitous temperance.

Cars and trucks along the street during the Thaw are gray-brown, the color of lost dogs, embarrassed to be seen looking so forlorn. But what's the point in taking a bath, they ask? In this in-between chapter between pre-winter and real winter, the mud falls on the godly and the ungodly alike, so the Subaru and the farm-use truck next to it don't look all that different, mud being a great equalizer in Nature's homogenizing democracy.

But I'd hate to be a weatherman these days, wouldn't you? I mean, really, having to rely on past patterns to predict future weather events of any kind. Even the seasons seem to be stepping on each others' toes, as if they can't quite regain the beat and meter in their ancient dance.

Who knows? Should temperatures continue in their general rising pattern of the past three decades, there may come a time when there will be no frozen soil to thaw in future Virginia Januarys--an easy possibility to believe, too warm as I sit here on the front porch in the sun on January 10, the thaw here early and perhaps staying with us for a while.

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Fossils--even fossils of large animals with heavy bones--are vanishingly uncommon. I read somewhere that in an animal species lineage, and a good one archeologically mind you, a fossil in the series was unearthed once somewhere in the whole world for every million years of the creature's existance. And so that makes this two-for-one find all the more remarkable. And beyond that, they were preserved instantly in the dance of predator and prey in attack and defense position.

"Amongst all the fossils ever found in the world, there might be nothing more bizarre than this specimen. One Protoceratops, a herbivorous (plant-eating) dinosaur, perished in the struggle with a carnivorous theropod, Velociraptor. After their death 80 million years ago, both skeletons were fossilized, then finally unearthed in 1971 in fully articulated forms without having been smashed." (See the pictures!) link

The explanation for how this came to be: the dinosaurs were caught and buried by a sudden sandstorm. That leaves me unsatisfied. Whatever happened had to be so instanteous that it was faster than these animal's reflexes. And it had to leave them dead perfectly in place, so no large displacement like mudslide, landslide or flood works here. Ideas?

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You may have heard that while we are having record high temperatures during the January thaw in our neck of the woods, it's "The Day After Tomorrow" in eastern and northern Europe, with temperatures plunging suddenly from Finland to Japan to as low as -70 degrees F.

Meanwhile, life goes on:

The freeze coincided with Epiphany, when typically thousands of Russians flock to rivers and lakes to immerse themselves in a commemoration of the baptism of Christ. All evening on Thursday, men and women had been taking turns stripping to their bathing suits and plunging in over their heads. Valery Gritskov, an Emergency Ministry rescuer standing nearby, shook his head and quoted a line from a famous poem by Fyodor Tyutchev: "You can’t understand Russia with your brain."

And in Turkey, some 1400 villages were reported cut off by snow. But here's the really sad part: it is now illegal to...well, here's the quote:

...the Uzbekistan authorities added to the misery by banning fur-lined underwear.

Authorities in icy Tashkent, citing the "unbridled fantasy" that the newfangled thermal undergarments could arouse, have ordered an immediate halt to sales of men's and women's underwear lined on the inside with animal fur.

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Well, March is, anyway. A March-blooming wildflower species for the past two years has been blooming in January--this year as early as January 11. Listen to this 3-minute segment from a recent NPR interview with the botanists who are following this unseasonal discovery.

And some folks are not suprised by earlier bloom dates. Unpublished findings seem to indicate that, even in the recent fifty year trend of CO2 increase (averaging 1.3 ppm increase each year) there has been a 2.2 ppm increase in the first ten months of 2005. To some, this suggests a 'tipping point' has been reached such that change is causing yet more change--the normal checks and balances no longer moderating the rate of temperature rise. link

The planet has been amazingly resilient to excessive change over recent millenia, according to James Lovelock who, back in the late seventies, formulated the world-systems idea that came to be known as the Gaia Hypothesis which sees Earth as a self-organising and self-regulating system. This new way of understanding the relationship between life and planet was ignored at first, but ultimately, Lovelock has gained considerable respectability for his ideas as they have matured. Now, when he speaks, people listen.

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Doug Thompson has documented amusement parks, battle fields and everything in between. But last night at the Floyd Library, he documented the topic on which he is a world authority: Doug Thompson. To no one's surprise, his 40-years-in-one-hour biography was media rich, and worked, though his gigabytes of graphics tested the audiovisual capacity of the library's equipment! Even after two years (almost to the day) of knowing Doug, I learned some things and heard some stories I didn't know. And I'm sure we've only heard the tip of the iceberg. No, wait. Bad analogy. Can you hear the tip of an iceberg? Nevermind.

And speaking of language: there will be a 'spoken word' event tomorrow night (7:30 I think) at Cafe del Sol in downtown Floyd. I think anyone can take a slot to read their work. I've been out of the loop for a while, writers-group-wise, so will be good to see some once-familiar faces in Floyd's only wireless cafe.

The county is a happening place of late. Sunday marked the kickoff for the 175th anniversary of the town and county with the real celebration to come in September. Meanwhile, a rather large chunk of change has been obtained for historical protection and downtown improvements--implemented, everyone hopes, so that the small town charm of Floyd isn't lost, but the rusted water tower gets painted. Finally.

I'm sure it is the fact that we are expecting near-record temperatures today that I have a faint hope of spring this morning. Days are longer by a few minutes now and those of us seasonally-affected should take hope! We'll hear spring peepers--maybe this week--before they get their tailless little hinneys frozen solid in their puddles the next.

Tomorrow: pictures. I literally haven't picked up the camera in two weeks! This keeping focused on one project just doesn't suit my multi-tasking way of doing things. Gotta mix it up. Pictures--of the dog, of the new room behind the house now under roof, of the barn improvements I've never blogged about--who knows. I just know I need to feel that camera in my hands SOON!

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For some people, the area around the Appalachian Mountains conjures images of backwater mountain men with limited cultural or historical importance.

... author Jeff Biggers is attempting to dispel that notion with his new book, "The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America."

Studs Terkel had this to say about the book:

"The shameless caricatures-'hillbilly' and 'redneck'--have in popular thought defined the people of Appalachia, in the mountains of the Cumberlands," Terkel writes. "If ever there were a folk most enlightened in the world of haves and have-nots, exercising their First Amendment rights with more guts than our 'respectable media,' it is the heroic survivors in the hills and hollows." link

For those of you who don't have a feel for where Floyd County is, we are not in the coal country found a few counties to the west and north of us as some might imagine (since Appalachia is often equated with coal mining.) Floyd is technically an Appalachian county on the edge of the economic map, very near Roanoke just northeast of us.

Want to know more about this 'other America?' Check out the Encyclopedia of Appalachia to be released by University of Tennesee Press in March, 2006.

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The weather archives for this time last year show about a foot of soft snow had fallen. We have none in our future, short-term, according to the poor weathermen who are scratching their heads wondering which, if any of their forecast models, will come close to our modern weather patterns.

These large poplars present an interesting perspective in the snow. Four trunks, probably stump growth from a previous logging, all survived. Each is close to two feet across, and they converge at the base just above Nameless Creek. I like the parallax, the divergence, looking up toward the vanishing point. This is one of my favorite places on our land.

I found some older paragraphs yesterday in which I explain that I want "my mineral remnants in a box" to be placed in the low fork of these trees, a memorial to all the moments I spent here, looking up.

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America's environmental footprint is the clown-shoe of natural resource use. The world is not enough for the likes of us. The planet can't sustain billions more who live like we do. Thankfully, perhaps, those rising giant nations may 'get it' where we don't seem to, and not go where we have gone.

The dramatic rise of China and India presents one of the gravest threats—and greatest opportunities—facing the world today, says the Worldwatch Institute in its newly released State of the World 2006 report.

While this annual report (which I've been following every year for 20+ years) always produces ample statistics of the world's brinksmanship approach to sustainability, it can also provide encouragement that things could go better for us. This excerpt from the larger report is an excellent source of comparisons in consumption and natural resource usage by the US compared to India and China. The encouraging part is that "a growing number of opinion leaders in China and India now recognize that the resource-intensive model for economic growth can't work in the 21st century." Consider these examples:

In 2005, both nations committed to accelerating the development of new energy sources. India will seek to increase renewable energy's share of its power from 5 per cent to 20-25 per cent, while China's ambitious renewable energy law stands a good chance of jumpstarting wind power, biofuels, and other new energy options.

In India, where 43 per cent of the annual rain and snowfall fails to reach rivers and aquifers, NGOs have championed water harvesting, using simple technologies that capture and store water before it can flow away. In Chennai, the country's fourth largest city, some 70,000 buildings harvest rainwater.

In 2004, China implemented automobile fuel economy standards that are based on European standards and tougher than those in the United States. China's commitment to energy efficiency is also reflected in its status as the world leader in producing and installing compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Indian officials recently replicated successful small-scale biodiesel programs in 100 additional villages in the hopes of bringing revenue to depressed rural communities while powering local electrical grids and irrigation pumps.

While I understand these plums of exemplary practice are not yet standard practice in those massive countries, it kind of makes me sad to see these 'developing' countries showing leadership in sustainable resource use with an eye to a future our administrations seem blind to. If we can't be a top-down leader, maybe in time, we can become a bottom-up follower.

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A week ago today I spent 6 hours in a workshop on Designing Strength and Rehabilitation Programs for patients who had graduated from PT acute care and were about to enter post-rehab wellness and gym programs. I came home with an 80-page book of tips, charts, facts, guidelines and internet links I have yet to review. But I also came home with a renewed appreciation for just how important it is that we get enough physical activity in our increasingly lethargic and sedentary lives (with the fingers of the pointing hand coming back towards me!)

If exercise were a drug, we'd need little else in our burgeoning medicine cabinets. It indeed covers a multitude of ills that flesh is heir to. The list of benefits keeps growing the more we learn about it, and we see the consequences in health care costs as we neglect it. Consider this study released just yesterday:

Older people who exercise three or more times a week are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia, according to a study that adds to the evidence that staying active can help keep the mind sharp.

Researchers found that healthy people who reported exercising regularly had a 30 to 40 percent lower risk of dementia. link

This study didn't specify what kind of exercises at what exertion level and for how long. More work is needed. But the evidence seems clear: we're far more prone to back pain, cardiovascular disease, obesity and its consequences and even early dementia because we don't take nature's best medicine that can be as simple and uncostly as a brisk walk in the park!

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If a blogger's vital signs come from the number of future posts he or she has queued up for future entries, then thee had best call the undertaker. How very unlike our boy. He is barely breathing this morning.

Not that this near-death experience is not unprecedented over the course of more than three years of morning exposures to the empty page. I look back through the archives (usually a wonderful prompt to writer's block) and see many posts, cycling about once a season, where I didn't have anything to say, and so made that the topic of a blog post. Yawn. And yet, on days like this where we must hold a mirror up to the nostrils of our little blog and look for mere traces of life, it's encouraging to know these moribund periods don't last. And it is particularly a relief to have some ideas of the etiology of this catatonic state. We can trace it to its source.

Home construction: It is being done this time by one man. But he is over here most every day. His mere presence creates a niggling you-are-not-alone sensation that makes me keep all my clothes on, literarily speaking, and I don't submerge into any subject as deeply or write with as much satisfaction as I do if I am here at the desk with only Tsuga to 'help' me write.

New job: It takes its toll, as all new jobs do. I've never done PT two days a week. I think it's harder to come into the full rhythm of how things flow, who does what and where things go when you aren't there but Tuesdays and Fridays. It's hard inheriting patterns and paperwork I didn't create and for which I can't quite catch the meter and melody. And the days are longer and harder than I'd hoped, and, like this morning, I have work I must do from home to complete patient care from the day before. It's hard to browse archives or bookmarks when there are four evaluations to finish. Sorry, Muse.

So-called Book. The tome is being considered for plastic surgery. Well more than that. More than a nose job. More like trying to turn a bicycle into rabbit. What I have is a hundred fragments--about nature, family, and place. What I need is a 'narrative arc' that glues those irregular shards of this place, this life, these unique times together to justify their being between covers. It's been a month since my final exam and the beginning of my coveted eight months before going back. I really don't know if this is going to be the time I finally fish; maybe I'll just cut bait.

Winter ennui: Something's wrong. You can take my creative-force temperature by looking in my photo archives. December and January folders are almost completely empty. Hypothermia is indicated. There's barely a photographic pulse. Breathing is shallow. It is a kind of January hibernation. I've been here before and have become a seed in frozen soil. Waiting.

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I confess, this morning, the glass is half empty. It is raining and two hours before first light. I didn't sleep much for dreading the day ahead--the busiest I will have had so far in my trial re-entry into health care. I'm afraid what I need to do today will be more than I can do in a way that is paperwork-complete and well thought out and satisfactory when the day is done. But in the end, other than upsetting an insurance bureaucrat or clerical person or two, the consequences of my little omissions and oversights will do no harm.

And then, I think about the job that others are waking to this morning. What kinds of nocturnal angst and insights must Dr. David Nabarro have, I wonder, while I buckle under the lightweight burden of dealing with problems that can be cured by ultrasound and exercise?

Nabarro's job is to prepare six UN agencies and 191 member states for an international response to a flu pandemic, which World Bank officials estimated in November may cost $800 billion to control, based on the experience of the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, in East Asia in 2003.

Four years after completing medical training at London's University College Hospital in 1973, he worked as a district medical officer with the Save the Children Alliance in remote east Nepal, where all travel was on foot and communication was in Nepali, a language he learned to speak.

In Geneva, Nabarro was director of the Health Action in Crisis program, responsible for mobilizing medical responses to the Iraq war, Niger famine and the Asian tsunami. Before that, he spearheaded the WHO's campaign against malaria in Africa.

As the United Nations' bird-flu coordinator, he faces his toughest job yet: galvanizing world leaders meeting in China this week to prevent a potential killer pandemic.

The International Pledging Conference on Avian and Human Influenza, which starts in Beijing today, aims to garner support for programs to control the spread of the lethal H5N1 avian-flu virus and prepare for a pandemic it may spawn. Nabarro, an Oxford-educated physician, faces his first test when wealthy nations are asked to collectively commit as much as $1.5 billion.

"This is by far and away the toughest job I have ever had; partly because the stakes are very high, partly because the challenges I face are very great in what I have to do and also because the expectations on me are substantial," the 56-year-old said in a phone interview from New York on Jan. 11.

In the 84 days since UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Nabarro senior coordinator for avian and human influenza, the H5N1 virus has spread west to Eastern Europe from Southeast Asia. It's infected at least 31 more people, killing 18, and moved the globe closer to what the World Health Organization describes as humanity's most serious health challenge. link

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Thanks Marie, Sean and Doug for coming to my rescue. I loaded the Photoshop action for the "cartoon" effect, then sharpened the image, added noise for texture and adjusted levels to reduce pure black a bit. This Painted Trillium is the simple kind of shape I need for illustrations. Not many of my images are this simple, but that is what the 'cartooning' does: take many lines and eliminates all but the main ones. I think we're on to something.

But I've decided not to spend too much time on the graphics, assuming that when I select a printer, they can help me problem-solve format, resolution and methods for getting illustrations placed in proper form. We'll see. One more baby step along the way.

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Did you ever have one of those moments when suddenly, you look at something so routine and unexamined that it holds no mysteries, but find in a burst of brilliant ignorance that you really know nothing at all about it? It happens embarassingly often in my cloistered existance. Sometimes, it is at the dinner table.

How and where do they grow, and who picks out those tiny lens-shaped seeds from what must be impossibly tiny pods, as beans go, and splits them from their husks so we can make lentil stew? How is it we can buy a pound of these weentsy little beans for less than a dollar?

Lentils (genus Lens) were probably one of the oldest 'grain legumes' to be domesticated. They grow very well in cooler climes. They contain 22 to 36% protein. Among the cool season legume crops, lentil is the richest in the important amino acids (lysine, arginine, leucine, and sulpher containing amino acids.) In the 6th century, chickpeas were believed to be an aphrodisiac; while curiously enough, lentils were considered to have the opposite effect, and this was probably the reason why the lentil was included in the diet in monasteries on meatless days. (all from this source.)

Lentils are referred to as a 'pulse.' Say what? I'd heard the term, but really couldn't use it in a sentence. So here's a new word for the vocabulary list:

Pulses are defined by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as annual leguminous crops yielding from one to twelve grains or seeds of variable size, shape and color within a pod. Pulses are used for food and animal feed. The term pulses, as used by the FAO, is reserved for crops harvested solely for the dry grain and therefore excludes green beans and green peas, which are considered vegetable crops. Also excluded are crops which are mainly grown for oil extraction, like soybeans and peanuts, and crops which are used exclusively for sowing (clovers, alfalfa). Pulses are important food crops due to their high protein and essential amino acid content. Like many leguminous crops, pulses play a key role in crop rotation due to their ability to fix nitrogen. from Answers.com

All of this was triggered by our failed attempt to find the St. Louis Bread Company (Panera Bread) recipe for their Meditteranean Tomato Basil Lentil Soup recipe. Anybody run across it, please, yummy?

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I'd appreciate any pointers to help me convert color digital images from my archives into small (2-3" max on a side) black and white images for the possible/probable book. What I'd prefer is a finished image that has a 'woodcut' kind of effect. I can find some plug-ins to purchase but am guessing it can be had for free with a little photoshop work. Any other ideas about 'artwork' that will enhance but not seriously increase the cost of a book?

UPdate: Still no luck for free. There's Cutline for buy and I'm holding out. I did find this cartooning effect that, converted to B&W, might work for some simple nature forms like leaves and such. The PS "actions" can be downloaded in this file, but only in *.sit compressed format. And only Stuffit Expander can decompress it. Stuffit Expander is a free part of a purchased program that you pay for at the end of the demo period if you forget to cancel. No thanks.

So can somebody who has Stuffit decompress this whopping 2k file (did it really need compressing?) and send it to me UnStuffed? Failing that, it's back to the undrawing board.

Posted by fred1st at 7:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

We had a little adventure in the wee hours and are waiting for first light to show what last night's storm left us. For certain, our heavy board across the creek is no longer there. How the dog got across the raging muddy water the first time is still a mystery.

"The dog wants out" she said, knowing it takes the least provocation to wake me from even the deepest sleep.

Tsuga stood beside the bed with is muzzle just inches from my face when I opened my eyes in the room lit only by the battery-powered Christmas candle that flickered in our window. And I rolled over, pretending it was a bad dream. The dog was wagging his tail--a sure sign he didn't have a full bladder. If he has to pee, he gets up from his bed in our bedroom and silently goes and stands by the back door. Somehow, I hear even this. No, he was up to no good and I could ignore him. But I couldn't ignore her.

Because it was raining at dusk, she hadn't taken him out that last usual time, and now felt guilty. "He really needs to go out now" she prodded both verbally and against my back, pushing me to toward the wet nose resting on the bed. I got up, grumbling. And against my better judgement, I opened the back door, letting in a rush of wet, cool air. And as I had expected, the dog's attention was not on the closest patch of grass but over in the pasture. I called him back, futilely, as he gained momentum moving out of the porch light and into the darkness.

By the time I got to the front porch and turned on the floods and grabbed the spotlight, he was in the pasture doing his deer run, back and forth, looking south towards the woods along Nameless Creek. I whistled and hooted, and finally after Ann got up to 'help' the dog's attention turned to coming home. We didn't know how he had gotten across the swollen creek the first time, but it was plain to him and to us that getting back was going to be a problem. The board bridge was gone. (We'll have to go searching downstream for it later today.) And between the dog and the house, the stream was 15 feet across, several feet deep and turbulent as a mining sluice.

We followed Tsuga with the light as he ran first here then there testing the waters and gauging his ability to cross. Both his and our anxiety rose as the rains fell harder and the pitch of the roar rose, roiling and angry. Should I go throw him a rope and hope he'd seen the Lassie episode where she held on while her rescuers pulled her to safety? Should I tie myself to a tree and try to stand midstream and grab him by the collar as he came speeding past, a squirming mass of furry flotsam?

He disappeared from the beam of the spotlight, running away from us. Where could he be going? But it was the smartest thing he could have done, though I wondered even there if he could make it all the way across. He went to the widest place, by the barn, where I drive across in the truck. The water was well up his torso and he cut a diagonal downstream as the swift current swept him partially off course. But he made it, and from there, ran as fast as he could back to the house, obviously having had the adventure his wagging tail had warned me of just ten minutes earlier.

It took three towels to dry him off. He slept through the night soundly. We had dreams of being swept to sea with barn yard animals bobbing in the muddy waters while a white dog stood on the banks, anxiously, trying to save us.

Posted by fred1st at 7:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

So I'm off soon to spend three hours with one home health patient. Well, not exactly: a half hour with the patient, two and a half with the paperwork and the drive there and back. I dunno. I think maybe I'm about ready to leave this paper chase for the next generation. But maybe I'll feel different when the day is over. It's never so bad when it quits hurting.

Ann has the day off. And I'm certain I must be imagining things. It seemed--surely not--that when I reminded her I would be gone all day and she would be home without me, it was not remorse I saw in her face. It was not sadness, for certain. I swear it almost seemed as if she was barely able to restrain a certain kind of glee. Could that be possible facing a day without Fred? Nah!

Meanwhile, here are some links hanging around in NoteTabPro that yearn to see the light of day.

SOS! Save Our Seeds. The call came several years ago to protect our precious seeds. We'd be up some kinda creek without a paddle should we lose the seeds that grow the plants that feed us. There are enough scenarios that could result in just such an outcome. Norway is putting legs on the idea--er, maybe roots is a better term--by creating a cave into the rock of a remote northern island where the world's seed stock can be safe from everything short of meteor impact. Sounds goofy now, but...

Eggs and Green Ham: This is for real--green glow-in-the-dark pigs. I can die now, I've seen it all. "They are the only ones that are green from the inside out. Even their heart and internal organs are green."

Froggy Went a Courtin'. And he did fry, uh-huh. Frogs around the world are falling victim to a fungus that thrives in globally warming temperatures. It kills frogs by attacking their skin and teeth as well as by releasing a toxin. While researchers had previously identified the fungus as a major reason for the frogs' demise, they have been trying to determine why the disease has taken such a major toll in recent years. Now, they think the know the culprit. Same problem is wiping out the salamanders.

Mushrooms as Art: Saw this and remembered long ago, when I used to carry around a two foot square piece of black velvet in my camera bag. One time in Alabama (out in the Grant's Mill area that now is cheek to jowl subdivisions) I found twenty different kinds of fungus and arranged them much as you see here for a portrait. It made a pretty impressive image, if you're into 'shrooms. They come in some pretty snazzy colors and forms.

I Had A Thought! But mine never turn into money. This young man's idea turned into this webpage and several hundred thousand more dollars than I've made on the web.

What the Hellebore? Feeling creative? Name a plant, get one free if your zany and creative name is chosen. I just like looking at all the varieties modern plant genetics has created. The genus Hellebore is in the Ranunculaceae, the buttercup family. Most are poisonous. But beautiful.

Counting the Cost: I was shocked when I read how so many people spend so much for various forms of entertainment and communications. According to Wired, "it runs more than $200 a month for a third of the households in this country. Four in 10 spend between $100 and $150 a month, according to the poll of 1,006 adults taken Dec. 13-15." Then I added up my own--even without satellite or cable or digital radio or iPod or other bells and whistles. Seems my hobbies are more expensive than I'd realized. How 'bout yours?

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I'm lurching along with the manuscript editing, which is the relatively easy part, and really fumbling with how to simultaneously work on what comes next: finding reviewers and possibly a paid editor, deciding about book size, paper type, font and such; and beginning to decide about how to get this between covers. What I am secretly hoping is that one morning in a shaft of blinding light a giant hand will come down from heaven (you know the one--with the index finger benignly pointing my way in a beckoning fashion--and snatch up this black three-ring binder with the cover taped in three places and instantly hand me back the completed ouvre with a dazzling cover, published by Algonquin Press with glowing reviews. Then I wake up.

I don't know how much I'll put out in draft form. I do know this is lonely business and I've gotten used over the past three years to having company in my staggering passage through WriterSpace. I can't help but offer you a place in this reeling field trip that may someday become a book.

Since a few of you read the first installment (which I now know is not a foreword but more of a preface) I have converted the file format to pdf, and if you couldn't access the first part in Word format, I've changed it--as well as the first part of Chapter One uploaded just now--to Adobe pdf and you should be able to fetch it regardless of operating system.

Nothing Ordinary: Reflections from Nameless Creek--a book in gestation by Fred First

Preface

Chapter One ~ Part One

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Of course I was delighted to unwrap the heavy Christmas gift, obviously a book of some density. And I was especially glad to open it up at random pages there amidst the wrapping paper and see the wonderful glossy images of nature for which National Geographic is famous. What I didn't expect was to become so enthralled in the text--of a 300 page book about Africa, a companion to the PBS series we missed not having television. Ann had seen me at the computer, zooming down to the points of interest on Google Earth that show and tell tantalizing details from the recent extended aerial and ground exploration of the Dark Continent. Santa brought me a version of Africa I can view from the chair in front of the woodstove. There is nothing like the feel of a good book in your hands on a cold winter night.

I've only just begun to savor its pages. To do so makes me ache for the immersion in biology topics that I've recently left behind. The older I get (and I find that happening rather consistently) the more I feel the urgency to follow my heart and speak my mind. I can follow, and I will. But I can't always speak on this page without feeling the constraints of benign censorship when the topic becomes colored with threat or conflict on global issues. Nature-at-risk is not a popular blog topic, even--or especially--if the threats are real and relevant to our children's future on this beleaguered planet. Even in the blogging world, the politics of 'environment' raise the red flags related to the 'who owns the land' issue. But Nature-at-work seems neutral enough. So let me leave this digression and tell you what I wanted to tell you before my typing hands took control of this blog post.

Listen to this: the trees are talking.

One early anecdote from the book describes what has probably become a cliche, an image in our minds from the African savanna that is this: giraffes in exaggerated slow-motion strides feed among the widely-spaced, flat-topped Acacia trees. But there is more to this image than meets the eye. Or the human nose, for that matter.

The giraffe only nibbles a few leaves from the top of each tree, and then moves on--a pattern of feeding that seems energy-inefficient. But this here-and-there snacking is not the giraffe's idea but the tree's. Upon being nipped by the animal's first bite, the tree responds almost instantly by changing its inner chemistry of defense. Within less than a minute, its leaves produce tannins (a bitter substance common in oak bark and acorns as well) that can reach lethal levels. Of course this gives the leaves an off-flavor after a few bites, so the giraffe moves on. But even then, he may remain hungry for some time until he moves away not only from this nibbled tree but from this grove of trees.

The tree that has been attacked raises a danger signal to other acacia trees by emitting ethylene gas--the same gas that causes fruits to ripen more quickly in a paper sack on your kitchen counter. The gas blows down-wind, and within a short while, unnibbled trees 150 feet away have also stepped up their tannin production. A giraffe succeeds in feeding only on about one tree in ten. And so the giraffes are fed, and the trees give up only as much as they can afford so that they live to grow new leaves to sustain just enough but not too many nibbling herbivores.

If there are more vignettes like this one in the three hundred pages I haven't yetturned, there will likely be more 'book reports' in the weeks ahead. But I know I can expect that, in the ecology of human relationships on this massive continent, the story is not one of such beautiful balance.

Posted by fred1st at 6:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

I have to be in Roanoke by 8:00 for an obligatory keep-my-license all-day program today. Worst part is, the topic is actually something useful so I can't feign attention. I need every word of it.

This is my first such event since I got the laptop back in the summer. I'd love to be able to take notes on it all day but battery life is about 2.5 hours. Maybe I'll luck out and get there soon enough to get the one seat next to a wall with an electrical plug.

Maybe I'll moblog from the Clarion Hotel. Wooo. Hooo. See you tomorrow.

Oh--and I should mention: I've had to set comments as 'with approval' meaning I have to individually publish them. I'm getting lots of crappy sp@m again, so there may be a delay on days when I'm not online getting the real comments from real non-sp@mmy readers posted. Just so you know.

UPDATE: You'll be just giddy with excitement to know I got my seat by the wall outlet AND the wireless broadband is humming. It's me and a clutch of middle-aged female therapists and a bunch of gym balls and a big fat handout. One more cup of lukewarm coffee and we'll be ready to go. I am gonna get so smart!

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I introduced Tsuga in the Foreword (and what I think should actually be called the Preface) to the book, but then discovered there were no entries at all about him! There needs to be at least a few, and here is one that I remember with fondness when the pup was only about two months old.

It is legendary how Labradors love the water. They were bred to swim out into the waves and fetch fishing nets in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic (and were originally called Newfoundland Dogs). They even have webbing between their toes that makes them excellent swimmers, and heavy insulating coats to keep them warm when wet. On Tsuga's second day with us, I couldn't wait to carry him down to the edge of the water knowing what a puppy joy it was going to be for him to discover that he would grow up on a place with two creeks right out his back door.

You can imagine my disappointment when he was not only not interested in the water, but seemed to actually be afraid of it--ran away from it, as if it were coming after him! Maybe the fact that there was motion and noise set off his alarms, and it might be that he could not smell any signals--neither friend of foe--from this long undulating creature. Maybe this was unsettling to a pup with such a short lifetime in this strange world where all the water he had ever known was mirror-still in a round plastic bowl.

But today, Tsuga was ready to get his feet wet, on his own terms. With a purpose, he hopped off the end of the bridge by the house and headed straight to the shallow water of the branch. It was as if this was something he finally mustered the courage to do, and must do quickly before his fear could talk him out of it. Into the trickly he jumped with all fours, and attacked the muddy bottom with is paws, sending up a spray of black muck. Soon, and for the first time but certainly not the last, he became a mostly black yellow lab. You could see the pride of accomplishment in his doggie face, all the world like a little kid making mudpies, proud to be really dirty now--like a grown-up working dog. He needed to go to the creek for a bath, but I would let him decide if he wanted to face the bigger waters.

So we headed over toward the creek crossing the by the barn. I sat just at the water's edge while the pup explored in the high rushes and sedges by the stream. Soon he came cautiously to brink, and put his paws just barely in the current with comical ambivalence. He so wanted to see what this motion and flash of water was all about, pushed ahead by curiousity, held back by a native fear of the unknown. In the end, his drive to exlore won out, and all at once he pounced with all four feet, splashing into two inches of cold, flowing water. To my surprise, he even flopped down with his pink tummy in the stream for a few brief seconds. And in two shakes of a puppy dog tail, he tore out of the water past me, heading for the safety of the house.

But then, he stopped. You could almost see it happening. "Wait a minute!" he said. "I'm wet, a little cooler, but I'm okay! I'm safe! That was fun!" So he made a circle, coming back to lie under my bent knees where I sat. You could see his wheels spinning, resting there, chin down on his paws. Then, creeping on his belly, he went back to the edge, then in once more, running around wildly in the wide part of the stream before quickly retreating back under my legs for protection. Over and over again he tested the waters, again and again he returned to sanctuary.

It was the funniest, dearest-doggiest thing I had seen since Buster left us, and I laughed til I cried. This is not a figure of speech. I cried for the beauty of that moment, for the pure goodness of the sunshine; for crows and ravens and goldfinches all around on a clear, crisp autumn day. The tears were for the innocence of a young life that I was allowing to fill the place of one I still remembered and missed so much. They were for the rightness and goodness of this new bonding with another intelligence and for the transcience of all of it. There is a perfection in such a moment that is ineffible and overwhelming. Thanks, Little Buddy, I needed that.

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I hold language in high regard, but as I look through these assorted pieces of this opus (or is it corpus?) of words, I see I have been rather cavalier about grammar and mechanics. It is time to pay the piper and do a number of search-and-replace repairs. One about which I have an unanswered question is the em-dash. This is rendered in my blog editor (NoteTab Pro) by using two hypens. Many of the book segments are blog posts pasted from NoteTab into Word for revision. But in come those pesky hyphens that should be one unbroken longer em-dash. Here's my question:

Are there any spaces on either side of the em-dash or do the two words on either side abut right up to the dash? I think the latter is the case, so I'll have to not only search and replace all the hyphens but all the already present dashes that have spaces on one side or the other or both.

So, editors, do you agree: no spaces bounding the dash? Hmmm?

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What do you see out your window? How far does your gaze travel before it rests on sky clouds trees traffic passersby buildings mountains? Or do you pay any attention at all to outer space beyond your windowsill? If you have a view that you hold in high regard, what would it do to you to lose it? What if your world ended at your walls. Can a person die a kind of panther death when their horizons become the edge of the carpet in their nursing home rooms, the bars of their prison cells, their cubicle walls? Do you take your view for granted? We should try not to.

The Panther by Rainer Marie Rilke

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which a great will stands stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise
without a sound ... then a shape enters,
slips though the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the heart, and dies.

I wonder how many hours I've spent indulging my senses and my imagination in the view from our porches, or through my window here by the desk. There are no distant vista, only this wooded bowl of valley, and our view ends at our perimeter of ridgelines. Perhaps we are gratified by outdoor scenes because they give us perspective and scale, because they reward our eyes with texture, color, and form. Maybe it is just to know that there is an Other beyond us in Nature, the Cosmos, or God. It's nice to have a room with a view, don't you think?

In 1905 Rilke moved to Meudon, France to take a job as the secretary of Rodin. When Rilke told Rodin that he had not been writing lately, Rodin's advice was to go to the zoo (the Jardin des Plantes) and look at an animal until he truly saw it. This poem is the result (as translated by Robert Bly):

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Small problem in FragmentsLand, but a niggling one: people who use bloglines or other feedreaders to access Fragments think I haven't updated since the last rebuild (that happened while I was in St. Louis) on December 17. Apparently its a blog metabolic problem and not a bloglines prob. Here's what my servermaster Doug tells me I should do. I don't often dive under the hood, so I'm uncertain how to bring about these design changes.

"This goes back to something we talked about when we updated to MT 3.2. Your pages use CSS 1.0 and MT now uses CSS 2.0. You do need to update your templates but it will take a lot of work. Your pages tend to mix styles, some links are relative while others are absolute, and the style sheets are not consistent throughout the site. The ATOM feeds are exacting and any variation from style causes problems.I’d suggest a redesign of the site using the current 3.2 templates, which are available on the Sixpart web site."

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Some of you have hung around Fragments long enough to see several surges of zeal toward the prospects of some day putting together a book. Those tides have ebbed and flowed, then turned to calm seas and slack sails when I started teaching again. Now, I have this broad horizon of open ocean during which, if I'm ever going to do anything but cut bait, the time is now to fish! I have only this weekend printed out the 60 thousand words or so, and still have more reworking to do. But the winds are at my back and land is in sight, even if far off yet.

I need to decide soon what to do when the manuscript is done. Do I look for a middle man to help me 'publish on demand' or 'print quantity needed?' Do I jump through all the hoops and send it off to a small trade publisher or academic press? Or do I follow David St. Lawrence's steps and do all the formatting and printer-readiness work myself and then look for someone to print in batches of a few hundred at a time? Do I include some 'woodcut' black and white images from my digital archives to illustrate, or not? Do I work concurrently on a 'coffee table book', a DVD multimedia illustrated book (maybe with narrated chapters) and an online book?

The other question which I guess I just decided has been "do I make it available online" as part of the introduction of the book to a possible readership. I guess I've decided yes, I want to do that--at least excepts along as the segments approach completion. So in that frame of mind, because they are so much a part of the full experience of these fragments from home, I've added a few pictures to a word document of the foreword draft. I'd be honored if you chose to download and read it. Reader-visitors deserve the credit for there being anything written here at all, so it seems reasonable to include you in the telling of the collected fragments that make the whole of this book which I am calling "Nothing Ordinary: Reflections from Nameless Creek."

You can download the foreword from this link. I hope to put this and future additions in the sidebar as a permanent path to the parts of this thing as it takes shape. I would be happy for editorial feedback and advice you might have regarding any of the future directions this opus might take that I have mentioned above--or your ideas that I would never dream of in a hundred years.

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Even the GOV has finally suggested that more needs doing on the individual and community level to prepare for possible breakdown in distribution of the things we need every day. But they don't tell us any of the 'how' to put by those necessities.

See Challenges and Preparation -- Individuals and Families from Pandemicflu.gov

Here is a fairly complete primer on the storage of foods and cooking supplies so that they retain their nutrients and remain palatable. There are links to water storage as well.

Prudent Food Storage - Questions and Answers

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My day job: After one week, I guess it's going fairly well, as these things go. I am remembering both why I was glad I left healthcare and why I missed it. I am remembering the contrast between a work-mind that must be totally consumed with logistical, technical, objective focus on the moment and the home-mind that can wander in the soft, fuzzy corners of personal subjectivity and fancy. I suppose we wouldn't know light if there was no darkness--not to say that the work is wretched and without bright spots. I think in time I will feel very at home in the physical space with the staff who are coming now to have names. I'm not sure I will ever make peace with the sad fact that in these times, a therapist spends almost as much energy focused on papers, policies and procedures to appease the insurers as he does thinking as he should about the patient he is with.

I have my first new evaluations today--the first patients I didn't inherit from someone else's plan of care. When I take in new patients who are 'mine' from start to finish, that fresh start helps me feel grounded in the new setting. It takes time. I'm happy for the chance to be there and hope I will find that balance I am looking for between leaving home and being here, between thinking critically and daydreams.

But I am encouraged for the most part that I will be able to find that the right mix between doing enough in my word and picture projects at home and being stimulated, challenged and paid outside it. So far, I've done a good job (he says, reaching behind him with great scapulothoracic flexibility for a pat on the back) in staying focused on my goals. I do need some help, advice and of course, encouragement. So I'll be telling you more about how things are going on the book and other endeavors in the weeks ahead.

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...to a computer near you.

I used to look forward to the 'new car season' when the showrooms would pull the shrouds from the car-shaped forms underneath and we would oooh and aaaahh at the new and daring tail fins or grinning grillwork of the futuristic Fairlanes and shiek Chevettes that gleamed under the bright lights. But then, if I'm remembering right (odd or even years, maybe) when the changes were minor and ho-hum and why bother taking a trip to the motor mile. Same is true with computer software, where 'upgrades' can be all but invisible even if the crash test dummies survived better with version .01b than .01a.

Having said that, it looks like the next jump in Microsoft's major products will be worth going to the showroom to see--which you can already do, sort of.

The operating system, VISTA, is looking more and more like "WoW! I Coulda had a V8" except it's MacIntosh's GUI that we coulda had long time ago. They claim intuitive and secure. We'll see. Take the tour.

And Office 12 has some major rethinks in all the components, but mostly I am interested in Word and particularly, OneNote. The latter program is one I've tried to rely on while it is still missing some obvious pieces. It will get most of those pieces in Office 12.

So, I guess I'll have to go back to teaching next year so I can get the academic discount on these two bundles. The only other way to do that would be to replace the desktop. Hmmmm. With an Apple, maybe?

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With the certainty that my brain's memory might fade over the years, I archive the trivial events of our days to the memory of my computer. Several years ago, I started keeping a simple word processor table, four cells across by three down, as my way of keeping in order what happened when. Each square contains the name of the month and a bulleted list for the mundane happenings of an easily forgotten life.

Bullet: Last frost
Bullet: First blooms of Bloodroot and Hepatica along Goose Creek
Bullet: Heavy rains. Road washed out.

But some months, I've forgotten to record a single item. Then, I have had to try to go back in time and retrieve the memories. I don't always succeed when markers of time that seemed so significant in the present moment become lost in the gray haze of past and perfectly ordinary days. I bring up this matter of remembering because, here in April, I must revisit winter to add an unrecorded jot to the calendar for January past.

Our narrow valley is flanked by rugged hillsides overgrown in what mountain folk sometimes call a "laurel slick". These under-story shrub-forests of Rhododendron and Mt Laurel are always on steep and rocky grades where soil is thin and foot travel nigh impossible. You'd be wise to find another way to get where you're going than to look for a path through such a place as this but my wife was determined that was just the way she would go.

Against the skyline along the crest on our east ridge, a gentle V-shaped cleft of sky marks where a wet-weather stream has cut its way down the mountainside, invisible beneath the arching greenery. For days after every hard rain, we leap over the little brook that swells out of this laurel thicket to flow across our footpath, bound eventually for the south fork of the Roanoke River. In the distance up the hillside we could hear- but could not see-that water was falling under the slick of dark and leathery leaves.

And here is what I must not forget: On her few days home the week after Christmas, in spite of all the to-do of the holidays, my wife Ann was determined that she would reach that invisible waterfall. She would cut the twisted laurel branches and clear a trail up the steep slope to the little cataract. She would pull fallen limbs and debris from the shallow plunge pool beneath the rocky ledge. Finally, from two flat rocks and an old board she would fashion a seat where we-or she alone-could sit, sheltered from the pressure and hurry of the larger world. In her digging and tugging, in the clamoring over the steep and secret place was such grand play, and we play so seldom any more.

But like the neglected trail she cleared through a laurel slick to tiny hidden falls, the memory of that brief window in time will soon be obscured by obligations and duties. Routine and the passage of anonymous and featureless days will shroud the memory of that time in forgetfulness-those special hours my wife spent purchasing her dream.

And now, so that I will be able to recall them again from the impenetrable thicket of the past, I want to go back and add those days to my computer calendar memory for January, 2005:

Bullet: Ann's falls.

This is a revisited fragment from this week, one year ago.

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"Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010." James Howard Kunstler (writing in Rolling Stone) holds little optimism that we have what it takes to face the energy transition that lies in our near future. I agree. It is only one of the herd of elephants in the room that Americans don't want to look at, hence our predicament is made worse.

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

When petrofuels can't be had in every city square mile, everything changes. "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them" Mr. Einstein said. Do we have the capacity of character and will to change the way we think while there is time?

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Wishing on a star only works if you're a green cricket in a tuxedo. We'd better start singing a new song, soon. Another longer piece by Mr. Kunstler--his predictions for 2006--is here, in the Energy Bulletin.

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For those of you who always complain of missing the live via-internet broadcasts of the Friday essays, our local NPR station, WVTF, has been 'taping' them for retrieval at your leisure. I discovered from a reader visit that an essay I recorded a few weeks back will air this Friday at the usual times: after the Civil War piece at 6:50 and again a 8:50. But you can listen here (with Real Audio) to my little tale any time before or after that.

And I suggest that you peruse some of the other radio essays you'll find there from weeks past. Most are worth three minutes of your time.

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Well now that the Moveable Type demons have perhaps been exorcised, here is the image I first tried to post a week ago. I had some tale of the year in retrospect I was going to weave around this mountaintop experience from the Buffalo with young photog Jonathan this past October. For the life of me, I can't remember where I was headed with this blarney, so I'll just let the image stand alone--a great memory, a Nikon Moment (sorry, Kodak) from 2005.

May there be such peak experiences ahead for all of us in the new year.

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There was supposed to be an image (remember when there were pictures on Fragments?) but due to technical hairballs left over from the last resussitation of the MT circuitry, I can't post images. Our technical wizards are working on it.

Tuesday and blogging lite. I have an 8:00 patient and a very full day. My 'easy ramping back to full speed' hit a snag when the owner had a death in the family out of state; she won't be around all week to answer my questions, the number of which is enormous. Where's this, when do I do that, what forms go with this insurance company, how often do I xyz? I hate starting a new job--anywhere. At least the clinic is a nice place and the staff is very helpful. But the days will be totally devoid of any daydreaming or word-play, and there won't be anything left in the evenings when I get home. Thank goodness this is a two-day-a-week job.

Well, bloggers have certainly taken a vacation since last weekend. If you are one of them, hope you enjoyed your short sabbatical and are ready to get back in the chair and tell us what you got for Christmas.

Let's see what's on my queue of possible posts--time for just a couple of light-weight items.

You are walking in the woods. You know about staying away from the yellow snow. But what about the blue snow?

If you still have that hollow feeling in your head from drinking more than you should have over the holidays, you may be able to blame the shape of your glass.

Odd. How Things Work has a nice spread on, er Narnia. Beautiful, printable paintings of the wardrobe, etc. Anybody seen the movie?

I got tired of looking at the plain pale rectangle icon on the tab and bookmark for Fragments on the Firefox tab bar, so I replaced it with a Gary Larson character--one of the chubby freckled guys in a red hunter cap. He looked like his name might be Fred. Find your own character--maybe the portly lady with the beehive hairdo and the pointy black glasses?

Feeling creative? Why not draw, then paint a wooly mammoth on your computer. Look how easy it is!

If any of you are using del.icio.us and are accumulating lots of bookmarks and tags, this piece of free software called del.icio.us director is a godsend.

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I never use the word 'calcitrant', even in my most creative spurts of verbiage, because it is, after all, not a word. How, then, I wondered recently, could one having never been calcitrant, be recalcitrant--the word I originally intended to use? And so I erased that word in my haughty paragraph and replaced it with 'incalcitrant.' And yet, that didn't seem right, either; maybe it wasn't even a word at all. This is what I found out that set my etymological mind at rest:

"The word incalcitrant is often used in Modern English, and is understood by native speakers to mean something like 'stubborn,' 'resistant,' 'uncooperative' (a Google search on incalcitrant brought 193 results, all with this meaning). Yet incalcitrant does not appear in any dictionaries that I have consulted. Incalcitrant appears to be related to the word recalcitrant, whose Webster's (Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1991) definition is as follows:

1. Obstinately defiant of authority or restraint

2. a: Difficult to manage or operate b: Not responsive to treatment

3. Resistant

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Most of do not have mentors or personal trainers to help us reach our personal or business goals. In my interim between teaching semesters, I will have to be my own performance coach. The best way for me to stay on the mark is to hold my goals before me, as well as my mission and my timeline. I also need some cheerleaders in the wings repeating the mantras of success, and the goalsguy has some decent ones I've printed to a Word document for daily perusal. They include groups of TEN:

• Ten Reasons for Mission Statement
• Ten Reasons Why THings Count
• Ten Reasons Why People Fail
• Ten Thoughts on Thinking

..and there are a dozen more in this Word document I've compiled from these lists, all taken from GoalsGuy, where you can also download 'audiobook' files on creating urgency and the anatomy of a goal. The beginning of a new year is a great time to do things differently, and better. Good luck (if there is such a thing) and Good Planning!

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