Darn, it keeps happening

First, I went down to the Highland Festival and it turned out it was fifteen bucks admission. I thought that was excessive since once you get in you're going to spend money on haggis and bagpipe lessons and whatever, so I passed. But I did have a pleasant walk down country lanes with the beech leaves turning yellow.

So now it's a week later and most of those leaves are on the ground. The oak leaves are still mostly green but the maples are turning red. The grass has pretty much stopped growing, although we've had no real frost yet. I'm waking up in the dark now and pretty soon it will be dark by the time I get home from work. We had a mild week but yesterday afternoon I built a fire and I'll need to do it again today. I've always said it's important not to hibernate, and you can avoid it in the city, but out here there's not much choice.

It's good that we have to go through winter, I suppose. A regular challenge overcome keeps us strong. But that's what it is. As a kid, the difficult parts were somebody else's problem and we could just enjoy sledding and snowball fights, but now it's a real pain in the ass, frankly. Maybe I shouldn't admit that but honestly, I'm not looking forward to it this year, intrepid though I be.

What's in a name?

Lest you think we do nothing but drive tractors and milk cows out here, every year we have a Highland Games festival where men in plaid skirts throw telephone poles and what not. Why does it happen here, you ask? Because the name of the town is Scotland.

That's the only reason. We don't particularly have people of Scottish descent here, and we aren't actually in any highlands -- in fact a river valley. But, the festival organizers figured it would be fitting to have people come to Scotland for the purpose. They have to park 2 miles away in a hayfield and take a shuttle bus because there isn't enough parking at the historical society property where the festival is held, which, is by the way, mostly not in Scotland at all but in Sprague. (Ssh!) Anyway, I'll check it out and let you know how much fun it is, it's an easy walk from my house.

Peace and Quiet?

That's what many people imagine to be the essence of country life. Well, it depends. I lived most of my adult life in the city and yes, there's traffic noise during the day and you'll hear people talking loudly or yelling. Sometimes people have their domestic quarrels on the sidewalk. You'll hear sirens a couple of times per hour.

After about 11:00 pm, though, it gets quiet. Often at night it will be dead quiet, until the truck comes at 4:30 am to empty the dumper across the street.

Here, the soundscape is different, but it's really not quieter. In late summer -- August and September, i.e. right now -- the racket in the woods feels almost deafening. It isn't really loud enough to impede conversation, but it feels overwhelming because it is so complex. Continual thrumming, chirping, skirling, trilling, cheeping overlaid by birdsong and the harsh calls of crows and barred owls. It evolves over the 24 hours but never stops. Late summer nights, in other words, are much louder here than they are in Jamaica Plain.

Then there's the gunfire, which I have written about before. If you hear gunshots in the city, you call the police. If people did that here, the cops would be camped out. There's a guy somewhere nearby who empties a 12 round magazine every afternoon, I guess when he gets home from work. Some people need a martini, that's what he does. Weekend mornings it's like Donetsk around here.

We also have chainsaws, and kids riding motorbikes and RVs. And farm equipment. The corn harvest is about to start and I'll be hearing it all day.

Winter is when it's quiet. When the snow blankets the ground you can step outside and hear exactly nothing. But you know, it's cold.

Bats

As I may already have mentioned, I've seen fewer bats this year than in the past. It's hard to keep track of how many are in view, because they move around so erratically and so fast, but my impression has been typically 3 or 4 in the clearing, maybe half of what I saw last year. As you must know, there is an epidemic of a fungal disease that has been decimating bat populations in the region so I have been worried about it.

Last night, however, I saw lots of bats. I got 7 in a single visual field, at one point, and there must have been more because these were all below the tree tops and a couple of seconds later I saw two more at a much higher level. So maybe our local population is healthy, so far. The good news, by the way, is that the disease is endemic in Europe but the European populations are resistant to it, and doing fine. We can hope that there are resistant individuals here who will be the basis of a rebounding population.

But I got to thinking. They use a tremendous amount of energy -- they don't coast or soar, their flight depends on constant, vigorous flapping. And they are constantly turning, climbing and diving, all this to harvest tiny packages of food. It's hard to believe they manage to achieve a positive caloric budget, but obviously they do.

Which brings me to the second puzzle. Why are all those insects flying around 25 to 70 feet in the air? What can they possibly be achieving other than making themselves available as bat food? Mosquitoes and biting flies want to be down here on the ground where the meals are. Same thing with insects that feed on plants - I mean, there's just nothing up there. There are, in fact, plenty of insects near the ground but the bats don't come down to get them. What gives?

A hiatus summer

This summer has been cool here, which is a great break from the trend of recent years. I have a regret, though. I couldn't put in a garden or do much work on the grounds for most of the season because I had surgery on my hand in April. Osteoarthritis at the base of my left thumb had gotten seriously disabling. I couldn't play the sax, it hurt to take a paper cup off a shelf or to take money out of my wallet. My cousin-in-law talked me into buying a guitar and I found I couldn't play it. So I finally gave in and went for the Hail Mary.

This surgery is pretty grotesque. They remove the trapezium bone that joins the wrist to the thumb, and stuff the cavity with tissue harvested from a wrist tendon. For the first month or so the pain is incredible. It's taken a good six months for me to get to the point where I'm thinking, okay, I would now trade this for what I had before. I can play my instruments, and the activities of daily living are painless. It's just heavy lifting that's painful and the hand and wrist are weak. But I figure I'll get all the way back in due course.

So I'll be doubly motivated for a great garden next year, but more than that, consider the overall course of my life and health had this not been available to me. I would have become increasingly sedentary, I would have lost some of my greatest pleasures in life, I would have gotten old early. This surgery depends on anesthesia, antibiotics, and techniques honed over decades. It's also expensive. Of all the people who have ever lived and are living, the proportion who have such opportunities is miniscule.

Arthritis is actually a major driver of decline in aging people. That we can replace joints in defiance of nature is a magnificent accomplishment. But just think how inequitably such really priceless blessings are distributed. In my social circles, we take it for granted. I met a guy at a party last night who'd had the same procedure. Now he's back to playing the mandolin. What astonishing good fortune.

Backhoe

As I believe I may have mentioned, I upgraded my tractor for a bigger machine with a backhoe. I've spent a couple of weekends figuring out how to use it.

I believe they call it a backhoe because the digging motion is toward the operator, which is the opposite of how humans dig with a shovel. Interestingly, it is exactly how humans dig with their hands, and how dogs and other digging mammals use their paws.

The machine has four motions. First, the whole apparatus moves side to side. That's just to locate the shovel, it doesn't contribute to the digging action. Then, the apparatus moves up and down at what you might call the shoulder. Apparently that's called the dipstick motion. It has an elbow, which flexes in and out, and then the shovel, which curls at the wrist. The basic technique is to get the shovel approximately vertical at the point of entry into the ground, which you do by manipulating the elbow and the wrist. Then you use the dipstick motion to push it into the ground. It won't go any deeper than the fingers on the bucket, but when you curl the bucket toward you, that pulls it into the ground and if all goes well, gets you a full scoop. Then up pull up on the dipstick to lift it out of the ground, swing to the side, and dump it.

That's simple enough but digging out stumps is a more profound skill. I expect those big industrial machines you see at the highway construction projects can just rip stumps out of the ground, but for my machine, a decent size stump is a project. You can't break the roots too close to the stump -- you have to dig all around it far enough away that the roots are thing enough for the machine to get through. It takes a bit of exploration and you have to keep moving the tractor to get various angles at the stump. But once it starts to move, even a little bit, you're getting close. You just have to find the last couple of roots that are holding it, and finally it pops out.

Species differ a lot. Even quite a small beech stump is tough because they have dense, sprawling root masses. With oaks, there are a few major roots. If you can find and break all but one, you can pull out the stump. With beech species, you have to excavate the Panama Canal. The interesting question is why these two kinds of trees, which pretty much share a habitat, have evolved such different strategies for keeping themselves in the ground.

Anyway, I've pretty much figured it out. Now I'm going to open up my clearing a bit, do some landscaping, and build stone walls. Meanwhile, mowing what I already have will get a lot easier.

Just to get us located again

My house is in an approximately circular clearing in the woods. I have another clearing across a wetland -- really a vernal pool, it's pretty dry in summer -- where my barn and orchard are located. My property is a 20 acre peninsula in a state forest. Actually it's officially called a "Wildlife Management Area," which means a) you can hunt there, in season, with a license and b) they don't actually manage it. The state maintains no trails, doesn't have any points of entry nor do they publicize its existence. So, it's wilderness. There are some old stone walls, signs that once at least part of it was briefly pasture, but there is also some very steep land, including a very deep gorge more characteristic of California than Connecticut, through which the Merrick Brook flows. There was once a mill there but it's long abandoned, only the ruins of the sluice remain. I expect some of this would qualify as old growth, although the species composition has changed due to loss of the chestnuts. It's predominantly oak forest with hemlock, maple, and beech.

So, as you can imagine, I have plenty of critters to look at. Yesterday morning, I stepped onto my front porch and a big buck was just standing there on the edge of my lawn. It looked at me unconcernedly.  I yelled "scram!" and it just stood there. I yelled "Get lost!" and it didn't flinch. So I started walking toward it, figuring on picking up a rock, and it finally sauntered off into the woods.

If you are finding me unsentimental, I see them every day, so I am no longer enthralled by their cuteness. And they eat my shrubs and fruits. There's plenty of room for them in the woods, they don't need to be coming around here all the time. Of course what I should really do is shoot them and eat them, which is the natural order of things.

Last year there were bats patrolling my clearing every evening. This year I hadn't see them and I felt terrible, assuming my local squad had succumbed to the fungal blight. But last night they were back, at least 5 or 6 that I could count. It's impossible to keep track of their numbers because they fly around very fast and very erratically, chasing echoes from their insect prey. I have a bathouse mounted under the eaves of my barn, a gift from my sweet friend Vicki, who I no longer have the chance to see.

Right now, July 4, it's raining hard, so I'm stuck here with cabin fever. But anyway, Windham County will be reborn.