Fragments from Floyd, Virginia

Fragments is Dead. Long Live Fragments

2007-07-13T05:33:00.000-04:00

It is the beginning of the end, the beginning of the beginning.

As to make me sure I know without a doubt that I should leave blogger, it wouldn't let me post all day yesterday. Nanny nanny booboo. I'm leaving you.

Over the weekend, all life support will be removed on our little blog. Heck, he's five and a half years old now. We're betting he'll be able to hold his breath for a couple of days and resurface in a new skin called Word Press.

He won't look the same. He'll be plain and pale, possibly rather hideous at first (be sure and don't stare at him or snikker) and awkward and disoriented and anemic for a week or two.

But the name will be the same, and the voice, and in time, the look and feel. And life will go on. You come back and check up on the old blog and blogger, you fickle flitting blog-butterflies.

Meanwhile, I'll likely post over the weekend to the sadly neglected Nameless Creek, Slow Road Home Book Site, or Field Notes.

Next week (BlogGods willing) there should be lots of grand daughter Abby and Grandest Dog Tsuga pictures and stories. I hope our newly metamorphosed Word Press Photo-Blah-Blah-Blog is up to the task! Come back and find out!

Many thanks to Sean Pecor (past) and Doug Thompson (past and future) for hosting and helping. I'd be down for the count without their help and encouragement.

Western Salsify

2007-07-13T05:14:00.000-04:00

It looks a bit like a gigantic dandelion, with the "poofball" as my kids called it up to three inches across. Also called Western Goat's Beard, Wild Oysterplant, Yellow Salsify, Yellow Goat's Beard, Meadow Goat's Beard, Goat's Beard, Goatsbeard, Common Salsify, or Salsify, its European kin, Tragopogon porrifolius, makes an edible root eaten for its mild oyster-like taste.

This plant was new to me in the late 70s, an invasive from Europe, first spreading in the western states, and this past weekend, found everywhere along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

My kids loved this plant--one we really had to look for back then. If you take a single "parachute" from the head and remove the long stalk and seed at the bottom of it, the top pappus bristle "sail" is so buoyant it will hang in the air like a strange sea creature suspended in a clear ocean, even on a windless afternoon. They would chase it across the pasture until it vanished into the inverted depths of the ocean of mountain air.

Larger image of Tragopogon dubius is here.

The Beautiful Insects of Summer

2007-07-12T04:30:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: You can listen to Fred's radio essay audio of this piece by clicking here.

I have an odd confession to make to you: I actually look forward to the insects of summer.

If this seems hard to imagine, do this: well after dusk on a warm and moonless June or July evening, take a lawn chair to the darkest part of your yard anywhere in Southwest Virginia and witness what few adults-or children-take the time to see: the bioluminescent dance of the fireflies. If there is magic in the insect world, it is here.

Pulsing, calling in a code of cold light, legions of lightning bugs lift from the bracken fern in our meadow, fall strobing from the crowns of the maples that shelter the yard. Close to leaf or trunk or ground, their lightning-fast flash casts a quick brightening over that surface, a miniature of their meteorological namesake. Each summer I watch their Morse code loves song reverberate between indigo hillsides at midnight, and the hair on my arms stands up: far more is spoken in the soundless words of this ancient ritual than we can ever comprehend.

Now I would be willing to bet that even those people who consider themselves squeamish when it comes to "bugs" would put butterflies on their very short list of "beautiful insects". These wispy six-leggers don't sting, stink or eat our garden vegetables. Their silent flight flaunts an abundance of form, color and pattern in garden and meadow.

But if I want to see butterflies up close and in large numbers, I find them gathered in an activity that's called "puddling" along the road or in the yard. Different kinds of butterfly prefer different places for where they aggregate, and it is not each other's company they seek but the common quest for salt that brings them wing to wing at the watering hole.

There is nothing more cheerful and welcoming than to round a curve on our Floyd County gravel road home and flush from a shaded seep two dozen tiger and spicebush swallowtails. They swirl and rise in a shaft of sunlight. But be warned: this time of year, my Subaru should have a bumper sticker that reads "This car brakes for butterflies."

And finally, the group called the Odonata belongs in my top three favorites of summer's flying arthropods. This insect order contains both the dainty Damselflies and the more robust and familiar Dragonflies. Because we have plenty of water for their young, a battalion of these insectivorous insects works for us, patrolling the airspace over the valley where they were born.

Of all the insects, these seem to me the most agile and the most intelligent. Their huge compound eyes give them a 360-degree view on the world that is exceptionally effective at detecting the motion of tiny insects on the wing.

I often watch them lying on my back on the walkway outside the back door late in the afternoon. A half dozen X-winged cruisers zip back and forth along their personal territories just above the roof of the house, thankfully, feeding on those insects that don't seem so beautiful or desirable: the midges, gnats and mosquitoes that also need water for birthing their young.

They all play their roles in our living economy-the voracious insect-feeding dragonflies-AND the bats that take their insect meals a little higher above the house, and the swifts and nighthawks far higher still that patrol the outer sphere of this summer globe of life on Goose Creek.

NEWS FLASH: See Marie Freeman's incredible dragonfly on-the-wing photos!

This appeared in the Floyd Press, July 5, 2007, in my column, The Road Less Traveled. -- Fred

Hyperlocal Floyd

2007-07-11T05:38:00.000-04:00

We'll not make it this year to Floyd Fest, where from the Dreaming Creek Stage, World Music will come--more musical notes than the number of ants on a Tennessee anthill--from Nashville and the rest of the planet. Here's what was said (Miami Herald) about the Floyd music scene, that includes this past weekend's Wine Down the Music Trail event (Roanoke Times article) held at the same venue as FloydFest on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Larger image here.

Blogger Book Review: Many thanks to David St. Lawrence for offering a kind and perceptive review of Slow Road Home both on his blog (Ripples) and especially for adding it to the Amazon.com reviews of the book--where readers of Slow Road are told they might also like Barbara Kingsolver's new book--a comparison I'm happy about but BK probably had best not learn of it.

Blog to Book: Slow Road Home was the topic of conversation at Blooking Central where Cheryl Hagedorn focuses her attention to the relationship between blogging and book publishing, gathering examples of all the variety of paths that can take. Cheryl included a bit also of an email reply to her about my experience in the blog-to-book endeavor.

By It's Cover: I exchanged several emails with a young man in Israel who had found one of my images posted at Fragments back in 2004 that he thought would make a good cover for his forthcoming book. It was interesting there for a while, and I spent a good bit of time trying to make the image work, but in the end, when I told him I didn't work for free, he decided instead to draw his own cover with a crayon. Just kidding.

Update--8:30 7/11/07! See Gary Boyd's (North Carolina Mountain Dreams blog) wonderful red jeep and flowers--his contribution for the America's Roadside Bloomery project started here a few days ago--now featured on Autoblog. Thanks for picking that up, Alex!

Black Velvet Or Backlight

2007-07-10T05:49:00.000-04:00

This tall wraithe of a forest wildflower is Black Cohosh. Like so many other wildflowers that are many times taller than wide, it's a hard one to show off in the best light. Unless, of course, you seek and find the best light.

And that is not all that hard to do along the Blue Ridge Parkway in the morning hours before 10 or afternoon after 3 in the summertime. Shafts of light slanting through the forest selectively illuminate your subject against the black velvet backdrop of unlit shadow, eliminating the busy, distracting blobs of shape and color that leave the eye searching for the picture.

You may have heard of Black Cohosh, if not as a wildflower, as a medication recently in use to treat menopausal symptoms. See this Mayo Clinic report on Black Cohosh. I suppose the drug companies accept wild-collected stock, but haven't heard of people collecting it for cash like they do Galax, Running Cedar, Ginseng and such. I'll have to explore that issue. There's sure plenty of it in the rich woods along the ridges here'bouts.

The larger image does a better job of showing this plant off at its best.

But Poison Ivy, Lawd'll Make You Itch

2007-07-10T04:55:00.000-04:00

So it's not just my imagination that everywhere I look this summer where there had never been any before, poison ivy rises from the ground growth around the house and barn.

But then again, this observation is probably NOT related yet to the anticipated rise in both abundance and toxicity of this ubiquitous town-and-country vine as CO2 levels continue to rise. Ours were probably just spread by birds eating and dropping seeds EVERYWHERE around here of late.

But the future promises more and better poison ivy. So, parents: I know you agree with me that children need to play outside more and inside less. Right? And you don't want them to resist getting out of the house because they're afraid of something they could be taught to recognize and avoid. Google images of PI.

So I'd recommend this at age 5 or 6: make a supervised game of "look don't touch" and train your child to spot PI as many places as you can in ten or fifteen minutes around your house, in the park or woods where they play. Teach them "Leaflets three, let it be." But then, not all three-parted viney plants are itchy. Help them learn the difference and avoid sitting down in it to watch the butterflies.

And roadside photographers seeking those Unplanted Gardens we talked about: fencerows--around here at least--are PI hatcheries, and if you wear sandals without socks, find yourself a coathanger to keep near your computer chair, 'cause your going to need a long-handled scratcher for a couple of weeks.

Light and Air

2007-07-09T04:51:00.000-04:00

Rude awakening. I sat down at the computer at the usual 4:00 ready to blog my little heart out--so much to show and tell, and just as I was stretching my fingers like a concert pianist before a big recital, an alarm popped up reminding me I have an 8:00 meeting in Floyd this morning. And another, that I have three uncompleted patient evaluations from work to complete before I leave for my meeting. I shoulda stood in bed.

I'd like to ramble in my usual effusive way about this shot taken yesterday within easy ear shot of the Wine Down The Music Trail event just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. But I don't have the luxury of that much time.

Suffice it to say, I risked poison ivy and had the parkway ranger stop and investigate the strange man hunkered down at the edge of the woods, just where the afternoon sunlight gave way to the afternoon shadow.

Take a look at the larger image (different specimen/composition) hand-held (Nikon D200 with 18-200 VR lens) with the wind blowing. It's a wonder you can see any detail at all.

The plant: perhaps more about that tomorrow.

NOTE: Unplanted Gardens Gallery is up, but rather empty. Anyone?

Bloomery Part TWO

2007-07-08T08:02:00.000-04:00

Well I can't complain about not getting the word out. Thanks again to Glenn for the Insta-lanche of more than 2500 visits yesterday in response to his post about the Unplanted Gardens idea. From those visitors, not so many pix, and maybe that's a good thing.

Were there dozens, I'd be up to my elbows in alligators keeping track of who sent what where and from where. Per somebody's suggestion, it would be better to have an external site to which folks could upload and provide their own links, comments, and locality data. Don't know exactly where that would be that would allow some moderation of images, as inappropriate stuff (nice pix, just not on target) would be sure to crop up. Ideas?

The tiny gallery to date is here.

Thanks to Sissy Willis for her initial suggestions for getting the word out. She links a blog post to her Unplanted Garden image.

Paul Morris sent a gallery-full, and I chose just one, location unknown but very nice.

Good to meet photographer Don Giannatti, who posted the bloomery link on his blog and also steered me (and all us photogs) to his Lighting Essentials--looks like a great site for photographers who want to "learn how to light like a pro."

America's Roadside Bloomery

2007-07-06T05:33:00.000-04:00

I had a thought after I posted this image of Black Eyed Susans (and other flowers) taken yesterday on a Floyd County roadside. Here it is:

It would be neat for contributors from all over the country to offer their images to an aggregate gallery called Unplanted Gardens: America's Roadside Bloomery.

All images would include in their composition a road of some kind, just to place it, and then the wildflowers that grow there unplanted. Hiway department wildflower beds don't count.

Each image should be 72 dpi, max size of 800 pixels on the largest side. Information should minimally include the location, if possible some ID on the flowers, and any other pertinent or interesting information.

If you would like to accept this assignment, send them to me at -- fred1st over at gmail -- with Unplanted Garden in the subject line. I will upload them to a public gallery on Smugmug. I'll collect these through October (there are lots of fall asters, Joe Pye Weed, Iron Weed, etc.) If at least thirty are received, we'll go farther.

We'll vote and there will be a first, second and third prize--some combination of the book (Slow Road Home), the two sets of photo note cards, and screen saver images for your computer.

Please forward this pleasant "assignment" to your photog friends. The more, the better. I will set up the gallery with this image soon, and it will be ready for your submission.

Here's the 800 pixel version of the image above.

Now. Get out there while the flowers bloom. And stay out of traffic!

UPDATE: And speaking of traffice. "AMERICA'S ROADSIDE BLOOMERY, a call to action for photographers. Cool" -- kindly posted by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit Saturday morning. Now you peepers send in those pix! Deadline: 15th of October for submitting, voting completed October 31 and prizes awarded.

June Moon

2007-07-05T04:37:00.000-04:00

It was all the more impressive because we had not expected it, and saw it all at once just as it was half-way up over the horizon. As you've heard me say, a far horizon is not one of our ameneties tucked down in the valley as we are.

We had been out for a rare night on the town and dropped by to visits friends for coffee. And from their place perched wonderfully on a hill with a commanding view during the day came their equally awesome night view.

I pulled out the camera. There was no time for the tripod. Have you ever watched the moon relative to the horizon or trees or buildings and seen how FAST it moves under magnification! So while this is the absolute best shot in the world, it serves as reminder of the moment, and I don't think it's terribly bad for a handheld shot (at 200mm with the repaired lens!)

But why did it seem so huge (not to mention ORANGE)? We're not sure. But NASA has some ideas. This info might come in handy when your children put you on the spot to explain why the moon is swollen.

Morning Meadow

2007-07-03T05:18:00.000-04:00

She scolds me when I don't stay in lock step on our ramble around the walking loop. But how could I leave such glorious light to bloom unseen? I had to stay behind. This was one of those times when light makes the image, the image in a sense is of the light and certain objects--a half dozen Black-eyed Susans that didn't fall in the pasture mowing--just happen to fall in those misty shafts. Larger image here.

I'll have more images from this same morning of light. But before I forget...

This weekend: busy busy busy! July 7 and 8, Saturday and Sunday, marks two nearby events. The first, the Wine Down the Music Trail festival at the Floyd Fest grounds. We're going on Saturday afternoon.

And nearby, just off the Parkway beyond Mabry Mill is the Crafts in the Meadow Festival at Mountain Meadow Farm and Craft Market, where the motto is "Uniting Southwestern Virginia's Artisans and Craftsmen With Local Heritage Farmers to Preserve the Traditions of Days Gone By."

And on Sunday, along with a half-dozen other authors, I'll be sitting in a lawn chair behind a stack of signed books, fanning myself under the book tent in the heat of the day--there to serve the literature-hungry throngs clamboring for something to read. They'll especially be looking for locally-written slice-of-life memoirish works from Floyd County. Right?

Evolving

2007-07-02T07:08:00.000-04:00

I have never been able to figure out this chicken-and-egg relationship between an insect with mouthparts, behaviors and life cycles that are exquisitely adapted to a specific plant species and the plant's perfect accommodation to and absolute dependence on those same insect adaptations for its survival. This relationship is often given as the textbook example of co-evolution.

The insect: the Yucca Moth. The plant, what we call Spanish Bayonet, Yucca filamentosa. You can read more about the biology of this relationship here (note the my Natural History page!). The plant from which this photo was taken is just beyond our front porch. We think the species name is based on the word YUK because they are taking over a half acre of pasture down where Goose and Nameless Creeks meet.

And more evolution: I think I have come upon the narrative thread, purpose and theme of a future book that will be a full color nature-related work. I can't tell you too much about it just yet (for both reasons of it's present state of immaturity and because I need a certain degree of nondisclosure to protect the concept). But it seems like one of those AHA! coming-together moments. It will likely take two years to carry to print. But at least I have the sense just now that even though there is not much forward motion in this long journey, the destination is known.

And if this project reaches the conclusion I hope, it will represent the co-evolutionary end point that brings together my long-standing love of light seen through the lens of a camera, my equally enduring compulsion to connect the sense and senses of field-trippers in nature, and my relatively new passion for writing about the images from such personal field trips just out our door.

Orange on Orange

2007-07-01T06:22:00.000-04:00

Well, the day lilies are in full and glorious bloom, so that means that the road crews will be along with their mowers to cut them down at their peak of blossom as usual. Maybe this year they'll take my suggestion and put this road on their list for a couple of weeks later in July so the lilies could know their glory days and not be brought low while in their prime.

But honestly, our 4 mile gravel road, like others in the county, show signs of budget cuts for roadway maintenance. Branches hang so low over our road that when they're wet, they drag along the top of the car when we pass by. The place is kinda looking neglected.

There's one spot on the high side where a tree fell across the road a month ago. Somebody cut just enough of the branches out of the top so folks can get past, but just barely. In times past, VDOT would have been on that in a day or so. We haven't seen them out this way in the month since the tree fell.

So. Today the orange day lilies that have escaped from cultivation from the more numerous homesteads that once inhabited this valley add color to every blind curve and hillside along Goose Creek. Occasionally, they come adorned with color-coordinated accessories like this Fritillary.

Click here for larger image.

Morning Walk | Venus Looking Glass?

2007-06-30T10:05:00.000-04:00

I think I'm in the right genus, but haven't keyed it to species yet. Those curved anthers should make it relatively easy to distinguish from its kin. UPDATE: Thanks to Rurality for the dope slap and correct ID: American Bellflower.

I had to shoot with the lens at 200mm because these were blooming up a steep shale bank at the end of the valley. The dynamic range from lightest to darkest was too great for the medium to capture so the highlights are blown; would have been a good time to take RAW and use Photomatix to balance light against shadow. But I was too lazy to think through this.

I love bringing images back and posting them while they are still "warm" from the field, though it's not quite as much fun having to upload blog-size and enlarged versions to Photobucket as it would be if I had a permanent place for them. Maybe this will happen soon. Sigh.

Larger images is here.

Friday Shorts: Almost July

2007-06-29T05:36:00.000-04:00

You can see a larger image different view of this shot of a busy barn swallow bringing food to at least two hungry mouths I could see inside. She returned about once a minute with her catch (that sometimes got away before the gaping mouths could take it) so I had several opportunities to catch her on the wing.

* That's My Name Too (three! four!) There is a Goose Creek in South Carolina, and they have a press--which is how it happened to come up in a Google search for the name of my little business, Goose Creek Press. Apparently, more goes on there than in our rural backwater. I give you exhibit A. It involved Rev. Jesse Jackson, who apparently stopped by for a photo-op.

* I'm tinkering with some new sites for the book. If you enter slowroadhome.com or goosecreekpress.com in your web address, you'll go to my newly-redirected site at wetpaint.com. It's very easy to use and change. Stop by, poke around, let me know what you think. I haven't settled yet, and haven't invested anything here but a little time.

* But then yesterday I rediscovered Terapad, where I'd already set up an account back in January and then forgotten about it. It is feature rich, but as far as I can figure out, lacks an easy way to get from the edit page back to the page that's been edited.

* Almost, but not quite. I just couldn't make myself enter the medical quagmire that is health care in America. Yeah, we have insurance. But I will do anything to keep from being jerked around by Southern Health. So I'm looking at something other than straight glucosamine for my crummy wrists and thumbs. Anybody know anything about Osteo-Biflex? It's "special" ingredient is Frankensense. Seems to be something to it as an anti-inflammatory, with a history of use that goes way back.

* Carry me back. The Kingston Trio sings Four Strong Winds. So clean-cut and earnest, the crowd so polite and engaged. Sorry: the good ol' days.

A Field Guide to Light

2007-06-28T06:32:00.000-04:00

That title contains some essence of what I'd like any potential photography book to be about. In some cases, the actual subject of a photo would be of most interest. But more often than not, it would be about the magic of a lighting moment--the light itself, the thousand different species of light--that come and go in this single small cleft of landscape and span of sky through four seasons.

This grassy composition lies just beyond the maple tree seen here earlier this week. Both scenes become worthy of the time to capture them photographically because they both benefit from the very same early morning light, shifted so far south along the ridge in the summer months that the sun's rays drop just there, just then.

I could create my own private Stonehengian calendar: a shaft of light at nine o'clock in the morning on the first day of summer will spill through the cleft in the maple trunk and strike the earth exactly here, the pasture grasses from must that angle. I could place a permanent marker on the spot to honor the light, the day, the year, the lifetime it marks.

And so it is for all the light that comes to Goose Creek. It is predictable, and it is so very transient and unique to each given moment and place in time.

To be honest, this shot of the grasses came from this day last June. This year, in the very same spot, the pasture has been cut and is only a foot tall now. But I know what I would have seen on this date in that exact place at 9 am when the sun came over the ridge so predictably. Except this June 28 is cloudy; the sky is flat-gray and somber with a thin fog lying over the stubble of pasture grass--its own kind of special light.

Click for a larger image.

Beauty Upon Beauty: Not

2007-06-28T06:11:00.000-04:00

Black Vulture Glamour Shot spotted on the same country road from whence the chickory flower pictures came earlier in the week.

I rounded a bend, and greeting me were three black vultures on three consecutive fence posts. Only one remained by the time I stopped the car in the middle of the untraveled gravel road, pulled the camera from the car seat to my eye, and pressed the shutter.

This one is nicely vignetted by a luxurious growth--of poison ivy.

Turn Your Radio On

2007-06-27T10:11:00.000-04:00

If you can take a slice of life from Southwest Virginia by ear. The last three Friday essays at WVTF are by local writers including my friends Colleen Redman and former Floyd Countian, Jim Minick. Each is about three and a half minutes long. Take a listen.

Essay by Fred First - 6.29.07
If you find yourself swatting at annoying insects that abound as you mow the lawn or attempt to enjoy the outdoors this summer, you're certainly not alone. But WVTF essayist Fred First has a different reaction. Fred First is the Floyd County author of "Slow Road Home: A Memoir of Place."

Essay by Jim Minick - 6.22.07
The summer months find many tending gardens. WVTF essayist Jim Minick stays busy protecting his tree farm. Jim Minick teaches English at Radford University

Essay by Colleen Redman - 6.15.07
There aren't as many farmers these days as in the past. But WVTF essayist Colleen Redman has a son whom she calls a farmer of sorts. Colleen Redman of Floyd blogs daily at looseleafnotes.com. Listen."

AC: Made in the Shade

2007-06-27T05:57:00.000-04:00

This is the time of year that even in the mountains, the heat enters into the conversation along with the details of the last thunderstorm that hit one neighborhood but didn't shed a drop on the next.

Folks sometimes want to know if we have air conditioning here in the old house.

Heck no. We heat with wood. We cool with it, too.

Five large maples constitute our summer cooling. The largest is the one in the front yard off the porch; it still has the remains of two-by-four steps that once gave somebody's children access to the thick fork of branches that shelter the road.

Two maples are above Goose Creek along the road, blocking our southern windows both from the hottest part of the day and from a full view of the pasture, May til November.

The fourth maple is to our west, between the branch that runs beside the house and the driveway. We'd really suffer the late afternoon sun for a while before it dropped below the high horizon well before the rest of the county experienced the same some hours later.

The fifth maple, to the northwest beside the shed, is the only one we could lose and not be hotter for it.

This picture (larger image) of a single shaft of light, a tiny packet of solor photons, makes me appreciate how many more of these light-to-heat rays don't reach the house in the summer months, thanks to our solar-powered organic air-conditioning system of maple trees.

They'll have their work cut out for them today. And the floor fans and ceiling fans may see their first action before dark.

Insert Image Here

2007-06-26T05:27:00.000-04:00

Barn on Daniels Run -- a Foggy Day in June

I am a man without a country--well, a man without an ftp folder for his photos, anyway. That's just about as sad. But Ellis Island is appearing over the horizon. I'll have my new citizenship papers soon, and you'll see the snapshots. Again.

For now, I'll just send you from this colorless, imageless post to SmugMug for your Blue Ridge view for Tuesday.

As it turns out, I did have my camera in the car with me that day, even though I'd only been going to town for a morning meeting on a drizzly-foggy summer day. Fat chance I'd actually take any pictures, I thought, but it's a cinch I wouldn't come home with any if I left the camera bag at home.

Just as I was ready to take the last turn towards the house, I noticed the fog rising fast over the crest of the hill and headed our way. If I went another couple hundred yards farther up Daniels Run, I might be able to stop and look back and catch just enough fog for a photographic backdrop before it obscured any potential subject I might find.

I ended up with several nice perspectives of this old barn before the fog engulfed it, and was glad I'd given my camera a ride to town and back.

Moral: it's better to pack it and not need it than to need it and not have it. That applies to umbrellas, extra cash--and cameras.

Plastics Are Forever

2007-06-25T18:04:00.000-04:00

One word: plastic.

Benjamin Braddock as The Graduate in the 1967 film may not have been at all interested in it.

Meanwhile, America has swooned to the seduction of plastic after finding a generation ago that "cheap oil" could be made into so many versatile, colorful and inexpensive tools, toys and trinkets.

Every year, about 300 billion pounds of plastic are produced around the world. And the best thing about plastic we discovered since the sixties is that it is practically indestructible.

And maybe the worst thing about plastic, Benjamin: it is practically indestructible.

Take plastic shopping bags, for instance. They are so prevalent across the landscape that I propose that they be named the new national flower. Lifted to bloom on tree limbs by the prevailing traffic-winds of speeding eighteen-wheelers, they are the most lofty blossom of humanity's love affair with plastic.

It's hard to believe it has only been some 25 years since we were first faced with that awful but lightly dismissed environmental conundrum: paper or plastic? And overwhelmingly in recent years, the answer has been-you guessed it-plastic. Fully 80 percent of shoppers choose it. I read recently that "somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year".

But wait. Let me set the record straight: that many bags are made and are utilized. But dear hearts, they are NOT consumed. They are NEVER really consumed. They are however, unfortunately, sometimes eaten-but more about that distinction in a minute.

So. Where do all those trillion plastic bags go when they disappear from our lives-the ones that don't end up in the high branches of roadside trees? First, we'll watch a bag settle into Goose Creek right out my window here, blown from the back of someone's passing truck.

From there, it will wash into the South Fork and on downstream, into the main flow of the Roanoke River. It may perhaps in high water become temporarily hung up in the branches of a piedmont streamside alder. But eventually, it will find its way to the ocean. And there it will not be alone.

Let's follow our wayward bag to its not-quite-final end (a Styrofoam coffee cup would follow the same route) all the way into one of six ocean "gyres"-great swirls of listless ocean sometimes called the "horse latitudes" where much of the world's floatable trash ends up in unimaginable abundance. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre between Hawaii and California can swell at times to twice the size of Texas and has come, just within our lifetimes, to contain many times more plastic than that area of ocean contains in living matter (biomass.)

Bad enough that our trash plastic unaltered and whole can strangle an albatross or seal (six-pack holders are notorious for this kind of death) or choke a green sea turtle that fatally mistakes our ocean-drifting plastic bag for a tasty jelly fish.

But perhaps the most ominous thing about the durability of plastic is that it can, over long stretches of time, wear down by sheer mechanical action into smaller and smaller particles without reverting back to its constituent carbons and hydrogens.

Many millions of pounds of these tiny non-digestible particles are destined over decades, centuries perhaps, to float in the ocean currents. In time, tiny bite-sized bits of plastic will be munched but not digested by zooplankton, the bottom tier of the marine food chain. These tiny animals by countless metric tons will be eaten by bigger and bigger fish, on up the food chain and into the grocery stores. And the plastic-and its constituents (a rogue's gallery of dangerous additives) lives on, and on, and on.

Consider this: "Except for the small amount that's been incinerated-and it's a very small amount-every bit of plastic ever made still exists." Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. And you have to wonder: do we need filtered-water bottles that will last for 500 years?

Where does this leave you and me? Perhaps we are on the verge of a slow substitution of non-degradable with break-downable "plastic-like" shopping bags and six-pack holders and drink containers and Barbies and Kens that don't require fossil fuels. As nearby as Virginia Tech, new, less persistent polymers for this purpose are being created using chicken feathers!

So the next time the nice young man at Slaughters presents me with that impossible paper-or-plastic dilemma and I don't know how to answer, I'll be toting a canvas shopping bag (it's a start, and something we can do in the near term) and I'll smile as I imagine a green sea turtle off the coast of Myrtle Beach munching contentedly on a real, digestible, peanut-butter-and-jellyfish.

Recommended:
Polymers are Forever http://urltea.com/ji0
Plastic Ocean http://urltea.com/rcx
Plastic A'int my Bag http://urltea.com/ucj

Keeping It Floyd

2007-06-25T06:23:00.000-04:00

Build it, and they will come. And the building is underway.

But what will they bring with them, for good or ill? What will they take away? Will they stay? And will Floyd lose even as it wins?

The town of Floyd (a collective for lots of hardworking and persistent folks) has succeeded in funding a face-lift. Local merchants are taking the opportunity to revitalize and build. Changes are coming. You can read about them in this Roanoke Times | New River Valley Current article about the weekend events.

And how to balance preservation and change was a big part of the conversation on Saturday. Finding the point of "dynamic stability" is the work we face. And people are talking. Most are optimistic the balance can be found. No one is certain.

Photo of "downtown" from Saturday.

Slow Roads Are Hard to Find

2007-06-25T04:47:00.000-04:00

It's surprising, even with the miles of back roads and gravel roads and side roads in Floyd County how hard it is to pull over when you spot a photo-worthy composition. There's somebody behind you; it's a quarter mile to a place to pull off, and that is across from somebody's house, but far enough away. But their dogs spot you and set up a fuss. And you move on.

I'm hoping to do a better job this year of documenting the passage of time measured in roadside wildflowers (and the insects that visit them) so finding those marginal places for this purpose is high on my list.

And I did find such a place, not very far from home--a mile or more of gravel road that winds down past a sheltered farm surrounded by rising, rounded pastures. A small sign near the road give the name of the owner and his wife. There's nobody there. Seeing the name, I remembered: I visited this elderly farmer at the suggestion of a local minister. He has stories to tell, the minister told me. He's quite ill, staying at his sons, and would love to talk--especially since his wife died a few months back. I recorded about 15 minutes of our conversation from his bedside, and never did anything more with it. Now I've been reminded, I just might.

This very common roadside "weed" pictured here is chickory, Chichorium intybus. It's a pretty little thing, but not easy to photograph to show it off at its best. Chichory is a relative of endive and radicchio, and I'm surprised I never experimented with its edible parts--with the exception of imbibing it this very moment as an adulterant of the Luisianne coffee in my cup.

Note: this image hosted at Photobucket, as my server priviledges are in limbo as I make the switch soon to Wordpress and a new stall for this pony.

Forficula auricularia

2007-06-22T06:26:00.000-04:00

Ah, what's in a name? In this case, more beauty to the ear perhaps than the named is to the eye.

But contrary to a long history of misinformation, the earwig does NOT burrow into the ear of someone asleep and burrow into their brain. Hardly ever. Though I met someone in town yesterday who might have been a victim.

I tend to think of these creatures as "coffeewigs" because that's often where I see them--around the sink, often under the coffee pot on first lifting it for the emergency cup of morning alertness.

Pictured here on the buds of some nearby milkweed, they do no harm. Their "pinchers" or cerci are rather puny, and though theoretically they can defend themselves with them, they aren't much defense against a broom and a dustpan. (They do, however, emit a strong iodine odor if picked up and lifted to the nose.

What! You haven't snorted an earwig? Well you certainly have lived a sheltered life!

Local Color

2007-06-21T06:17:00.000-04:00

First, before I forget, there might be just the exactly right person for this responsibility out there in the blogging readership (or among Google vagabonds who vastly outnumber regulars these days):

There is a need for a volunteer to staff the desk at the Rocky Knob visitors center on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Man, what a great, COOL, and beautiful place to spend one's days, chatting with the wide variety of folks who pass along the nation's longest state park.

Find out more about it here.

Hmmm. I must have had a second point in mind. Wonder what it was? Let's see.

I never mentioned that this past Sunday, we visited Haven's Chapel Methodist Church, right up at the intersection of Goose Creek and Daniel's Run. We didn't have time to get to our regular Presby church over in Blacksburg and back before the John McCutcheon Concert in Roanoke later that afernoon. (And seems I never blogged that either! Man, am I slipping!) Haven's Chapel reminded us powerfully of Berea Christian Church, whose cemetery our property on Greasy Creek in Wythe County bordered. On Sunday, we met quite a few of our neighbors and learned some local history of the houses and families along our road.

And thirdly...well, I'm sure something in the realm of "local color" will come along to fill this in. I'm stopping by the Farm Store (never posted any pix from there yet) and to town for some computer geekiness and lunch. So, third time's charm. More, later.

Image, a local Floyd County resident presides from upstairs (over what used to be Momma Lazardo's) as the new facade of the Country Store is completed, and ready for the official grand (re)opening on Saturday! (You may have seen this particular two-dimensional resident propped on stage at the "old" country store.)