The Winter Cold ----and Spring

Community Spirit Column April 2013

The Cold

As spring rolls around we get anxious to get at it. But truth is, winter is fairly popular around here and most of the folks don’t get too upset by the lingering of the deep frost and snow.

In these parts there is a genuine pleasure in the cold, a noticeable attitude of embracing the winter weather. It is also not uncommon to hear the ever-present desire to use the winter cold to discourage the “riffraff” from moving to this quiet place---and to kill the ticks of summer. Here, folks just move ahead with smiles and a content pleasure of loving our 44th parallel.

There are skiers and snowshoers who have glorious opportunities traveling through frozen trails.  The Ice fishermen, who with all their new-age contraptions, reside comfortably on the frozen lakes waiting for that one big one. Interestingly, there are individuals with their plow-adorned pickups that revel in pushing snow and snow-mobilers, who clad in colors of the race, zip about at all hours of the day and night. Around here the cold of the winter is just seldom scoffed----that is until spring is close at hand.

It is true last year disrupted us when spring somehow managed to arrive in February and then went ballistic in March. While this only happened in this one year, now we start thinking it will be a pattern and we start adjusting our thinking to accommodate the new system. The maple sugar crowd cleaned their gear, even a few tapped trees and stacked wood to get ready for their first boil in mid-March, but no. It is still cold, and that includes a touch of nighttime sub-zero.

While the winter is full of ice and snow, it isn’t until spring is lurking that we get frazzled when we slip and slide. The suspicion is, we are just getting tired of it, even though the winter itself feels like it just started. The time by the fire and the time to read is now almost past. Just like that, there it was, gone.

I heard one avid skier starting to complain, “Here I was thinking to put up my skis when it goes cold and the snow falls. So I says to myself, Well, spring would be nice, but hey, I’ll go skiing because soon it will be warm and then I will be bitching because there is no skiing. I’m going for it”.

Well, spring is a time of rebirth, a time to move on, to grow a few things and I really didn’t like falling on my butt this winter, so in a weak moment, I complained to my kid that I was through with winter. I hadn’t caught that many fish, and my knee hurt, and one of my snowshoes was busted.

On the other end of the phone, that would be the end up in Fairbanks, Alaska, I heard him say something like, “Jeez, what a wussy. Nothing but a girly man. We are people of the north and it is essential to embrace cold, the suffering; the challenges of the winter times”.

“Oh please,” I thought knowing he had just returned from a three week adventure on snow machines into the Brooks Range----camping. He was too full of himself as he glamorized the beauty of the untouched land, the icefalls, the expanses of snow and last but not least, the cold temperatures that challenge every living thing, and that includes those snow machines.

About halfway through his descriptive dissertation, it occurred to me that possibly he was the wrong person to bare my growing concerns of the late spring and the two feet of snow. In great glee he then tells me, “Man, you won’t believe this, but do you know that stupid fiddle song you do, called, “The Night the Whiskey Froze”? Well, ours froze. So cool.” Then rather than listening to me and my dribbling mutterings on the unexpected weather, he went on, “We found the eaten remains of a Caribou right in the trail, and the icefalls up on the river were unbelievable, and we ran out of fuel and had to go into a Native village to buy some for ten bucks a gallon, then the pull start broke.  Let me tell you, fixing that at twenty-five below was no fun. Man, what a time.”

About then his mother was wracked in what she calls retro-fear (fear after the fact) and we abruptly quit complaining of the cold. We just reminded ourselves how beautiful the weather and snow have really been this winter----and so warm.  (Whiskey freezes at minus 34)

In Appreciation of Leisure

Yesterday I watched Les Miserables and was reminded what life was like not all that long ago. Now, it is true the film represents the seedier part of life in Paris in 1840s or so. Today standing in a warm shower, one I took for the sole purpose of getting a bit warmer after a mountain hike, it occurred to me that the people of Hugo's book probably never experienced a hot shower----never. Victor may not have. I just took a shower for leisure. I stood in there realizing that only a tiny, minuscule fraction of the earth's inhabitants have been able on a regular basis to have this kind of pure pleasure.  My family didn't have a shower until the 60s not to mention the farm families of only 75 years ago.

It doesn't take just too much imagination to realize life only a couple of hundred years ago was not what it is today here amid our "civilization". The walk in the mountains we took today involved a vehicle ride of some 80 miles, all of it in comfort and the walk itself was for leisure.

As a result of this brief reflection, I found myself wondering about this activity of leisure. I found myself being stunned by the thought because of the many articles I read discussing the need to remove ourselves from this unsustainable "civilization" possibly to a position of an uncivilization. 

Having at younger times lived fairly close to the land, sometimes even in a teepee for months at a time, I figured it would be possible to reflect on that experience and try and remember pleasure and leisure. I went, "Ya there was pleasure and leisure but we in fact were backed up, one way or another, by the same old civilization". Yes, we slept on the ground wrapped in Hudson Bay blankets but for one reason or another we were not, at any time, infested with lice, nor ticks (sure, we had some), there was no fungal rot, no frost bit, no unhealed wounds. Still, I can imagine a native Americans having brief moments of pleasure and leisure.

Did Native peoples go for walks for leisurely purposes---to watch birds, to catch and release fish? 1750 in Europe was no gravy train. Do we live better now than royalty on the Renaissance? Our faces are not pocked with vile diseases. We have toilets.

Yet at times I read that hunter and gathering peoples, those who wandered about prior to "civilization" were more robust than moderns. But did they know leisure? It is very hard to believe they did, certainly not in the sense that we do----or if they knew it it was very fleeting, maybe something that occurred only a very few times in their lives. Maybe it was their dearest memories, a moment of warm sun of summer laying in the grass with a young woman--one who still had all of her teeth. Civilization has it's befits and in my age they are becoming visible---not long ago there were few survivors aged 69.

Squirrel Innovation

This last year we put out an attractive bird feeder and have faithfully supplied a nice platter of various seeds. The black sunflower seeds are the most popular and interestingly the English Sparrows don't seem to fancy them. There is also a spattering of millet and a few other unknown varieties but it would seem there is some thistle seeds in there as the finches muscle in for the action.

The sunflower seeds, however, also attact the gray squirrels, three of them this winter, and they are for the most part content to eat off the ground as long as some of the slob birds like the blue Jays scatter the sunflowers hither and yon while bolting as much as they can jam down their crops. There are a couple of other riflers that jsut push and shove, all of them in cahoots with the bushy-tailed squirrels. It seems symbotic but maybe not. The jays are just slobs.

Early on I had the hanging feeder too close to the grounds so the better high jumpers of the squirrels would get a run and jump 4 or 5 times their height and latch on to the feeder. They did this if the food on the ground ran low or if they just thought greed was good (Ryan style--or was it Carl Rove, Ayn Rand?). Once on the feeder they would load up the jowls and gullet and head back to their lairs to stash the booty.

I raised the rope to keep them off the feeder because their behavior was too glutinous for me and I knew it was a matter of time before they would bust open the entire contraption and dump the contents. It worked but I knew it was a matter of time before the dip-shits would get low on ground-action and then get out the ropes and pitons, and ascenders.

Of course that is the truth and it wasn't too long before they were caught trying to walk the rope. They would head out on top of it Walanda style but would fall only to find they could do it upside down. Once on the feeder, the looting started. Then I put a milk jug on the line so as to make it goofy for them--if touched the jug would spin. Worked. Ultimately I had to put on a jug on each side and to this day they have yet to get on. But I can see them out there looking up trying to figure it out-- looking around for options, then to the tree, then scamper to the left, look, ponder, but nothing yet. It looks like I have out smarted the squirrels. How about that shit?

Chickens---- Sustainbable Chickens in the Backyard

Seems like we have always had chickens in the backyard. Mostly they were egg producers, but they are also a source of entertainment. Once in a while, if one should meet an untimely death due to inappropriate contact with a predator, they went in the pot, but mostly they are for eggs, tall standing, yellow-yoked eggs.

Used to be one could take the price of the grain that they consumed, and it is not small, and divided by a dozen eggs and determine the cost of our eggs, but as time has passed the price of hen scratch has gone up uncomfortably, so I suppose a dozen now is close to $2 but still for these great fat eggs it is a price worth paying. In the summer if it is safe to let them forage, they can pick up a little of the expense in grasshoppers and plants. Truth is, we just really like them.

Today, when I came back from my travels in the greater metropolitan area of Amherst, I walked, hobbled or whatever you call it,  toward the back door of the house and as I did, the hens gave that sound, the one that says something is up, something is out of order and there is a need to be alert. I instantly said, "What's up girls? Got a problem?" I looked skyward because that is the usual source of concern, even in town,  but nothing. I hesitated and looked right at the flock, all of them being on alert, standing tall and close to motionless. As I looked a gray, ratty-ass cat twitched it's ears just behind the coop.

The sneaking scoundrel  saw me and high-tailed it because knowing I am damn tired of him pissing on my wood supply and trying to harvest the birds on the feeder. I have yelled at him, even have a pellet gun, but he is sly. He knows I hate him.

The chickens relaxed probably knowing, while the jerk-off cat is a predator, he is not a real threat to an adult hen, and they are big now, almost bordering on fat. The most interesting part of the event was the bird talk, the alert noise. All birds seem to do this. In Colorado the Wrens would make a panic noise when the snakes were around. The minute I heard it, there would be a snake somewhere, usually a Rattler or Bull Snake.

On one occasion, I peered into the thick hop vines, put my nose right in it,  to find myself face to face with a 6 foot bull snake. I knew something was in there because the Wrens were out of their minds. The Guinea Hens would make a buzzing noise when there was a Rattle Snake in the yard, every time, never failed. It might take us a half hour to find the snake but we we always would---sometimes on the porch and once in the studio.

What it comes down to is yard birds are sustainable. Those suckers make my day and are worth every penny and every pound of garbage they consume. Three clucks for you girls.

Revolution Watch---Global Warming

Here is a statistic I never heard before even though I have heard versions of it. Oct of 2012 was the 323rd month in a row for which global average temperature was above average. As Derrick Jensen states, there is  one chance to ten the one hundredth power of this happening. This means that it is almost impossible under normal conditions for this to happen. In other words, it ain't right.

So one has to wonder just what the hell is the meaning of this event? Where is this going? The tendency is to blow it off because the over-all change is like .7 degrees Celsius and sitting here in Wisconsin that doesn't mean jack. We don't see that much. Oh ya, last year right now it was close to 70 degrees, but today it is a very realistic 25. It is so easy to loose touch.

But what is now happening is scientists are screaming their heads off trying to tell folks that the shit is about to hit the fan. I mean there are some, like James Hansen that are going ballistic and he is not alone. But what do we get done ? What can we get done? Not Jack shit. Are lives are just so wonderful it is impossible to consider dropping our standard of living a single fucking notch. It is all about us, now. Screw our grand kids.

Our son, just today, sent a photo back from the arctic on this glorious day. I suspect the temperature was in the negative minus 25 range. These same two young people have horror stories of what is happening up there. They lived in Nightmute on the Bearing Sea a few years back. They now live in Fairbanks and sometime ago got a call from Eskimo friends out there on the Kuskokwim with the sad news that all of their dried fish for the season had been fly blown by a fly they had never seen. Turned out it had never been seen in their area but only 600 miles to the south. Life changing.

From the same area the tundra is melting and methane (greenhouse gas) is being released in unimaginable rates. The same tundra is also melting  under the Alaskan pipeline and it is sagging. The pipeline only moves 6000,000 barrels a day now down from 2 million. It will close when it hits 300,000. Probably good because the content of that line that is the problem. How do we stop using that shit? We don't and won't I suspect because as a plague species we eat everything until it is all gone.

I sure would like it if where these kids are, it would always be 25 below forever. But it won't. We are idiots, maybe be idiots with a fatal mutation.