Indian Summer

We had a frost last week that trashed my tomatoes, basil and zucchini. Then it turned warm again, downright summery actually. I'm still harvesting broccoli and basil and, somewhat remarkably, a tomato plant up by my house -- a volunteer that appeared after I rinsed out the compost bucket -- was unscathed. Apparently the frost was patchy and only affected the field, which is a bit downhill. I'm in a valley so lower means colder.

I had a grilled veggie sub for lunch consisting entirely of vegetables I grew myself. I still have zucchini in the fridge, plenty of onions left, and I harvested the broccoli this morning. It's the side shoots that appear after the main heads have been cut, which happened a while ago. You won't find those in the grocery store, but they're worth it for home gardeners. 

Anyway one lesson is that I'm going to build a cold frame, which can protect tender plants from an early frost and take hearty ones right into the winter. I have a lot of plexiglass panels harvested from converting a sun porch to a four season room, so I might as well use a couple. I'm also going to do proper preparation of the garden beds for next year. I'm basing my plans on The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, by Edward C. Smith, which I definitely recommend. 

If civilization collapses I'll be ready, at least by next July.

Don't take life for granted

A deputy fire chief in our small town, who is also the former first selectman and is obviously very widely known here -- a town with more cows than people -- was at the firehouse last week with his backhoe. I need to be fairly circumspect here and not say more than the family has made public or is generally known. He was planning to dig a trench for a new waters supply line.

For some reason, he started the machine while he was standing on the ground. This should be impossible -- that kind of equipment has a switch that won't allow it to start if there's nobody in the operator's seat. Evidently for some reason it had been disabled. I don't know why -- I own a backhoe and I can't think of any reason why I would want to start it from the ground, and I'm happy for any and all safety features. Anyway the machine moved forward (which also shouldn't happen even if it starts) and ran him over. He's been in the hospital for the past week in critical condition. I'm guessing if he hadn't been at the firehouse with the ambulance crew right there the outcome would have been even worse.

So this got me thinking, as I often do, about human nature. Workers who are instructed to wear safety equipment -- gloves, eye protection, face shields -- often stop wearing it after a while. When I was a youth I once worked in a factory where a procedure included dipping radiator elements into a bath of molten tin. One guy stopped wearing his face shield and you know what happened -- somehow there was water on the coil and tin exploded. I worked in another factory where they used hydraulic shears to cut blocks of paper. The machines require the operator to put both hands on widely separated buttons before bringing the shear down with a pedal, but the guys would put weights on the buttons. 

I could go on but you get the idea. Familiarity with dangerous tasks makes the danger recede from our consciousness. I've done this 100 times and nothing bad has happened, and I'm sick of this minor inconvenience so to heck with it. In the case of the backhoe it wasn't even an inconvenience -- he still would have had to get up on the machine. What's the point of starting it first except because you can, because you were clever enough to bypass the safety switch? 

So, slow down, think, don't do anything foolish. Somehow evolution made us careless.

Duh Sawx

Well, to be honest, right now Duh Sawx sux. (BTW it's Duh Sawx and Dah Broonz. Do not question matters that you were not meant to understand.) The owners ordered a salary dump, and they traded away all their best players for pretty much bupkis, marginal prospects. The only exception is pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez who is out for the season with heart damage from Covid-19, and no doubt if he were able to play they would have traded him too. So they're fielding a AAA team with no pitching and they're in last place, by a lot.

Whether this is part of a long-term plan to rebuild on a more cost-effective basis, or just momentary greed, I can't say. The plan was in the works before the pandemic but it sure was well-timed since people aren't paying much attention to baseball anyway and duh Sawx suckiness doesn't really matter. This reveals something basic about baseball as a product: more than any sport, it depends on the collective event of spectatorship. Basketball, football, hockey, soccer -- they're more fun when the arena is roaring with excited fans, but they're watchable without. Baseball really is not. The pace is so languorous, the action so sparse, that you need the electricity of the audience to keep interest alive.

This is probably especially true of the Red Sox because Fenway Park is very unusual in being right in the city, in a real live neighborhood with residences and businesses and a subway stop. Game day is a big event, with people and families of all stripes thronging the streets and pubs of Kenmore Square and the Fenway area and the east edge of Brookline, street vendors, ticket scalpers. Inside, the park is infused with folkways. Its scale is relatively intimate, and the crowd is as much a part of the action as the players. The gameday experience is part of the lifeblood of the city and region, a big part of what knits it together. Sure, dah Broonz and the Celts (who get a properly pronounced article) do that in the area of Boston Garden, but on a much smaller scale. And the Pats play out in the wilderness of Foxboro. 

There are costs of the present catastrophe that cannot be measured.

Your right to freeze peach

I have two peach trees (also some pear trees). I don't really do much to maintain them, just mulch and mow around them. I haven't done as much pruning as the official recommendations, but I've come to think those are just superstition. I got an incredible yield this year, the branches bending down to the ground. I had the neighbors come over to pick them, actually two sets of neighbors, and they took all they wanted and I took some for myself and I've still got peaches galore. I'm trying to recruit additional people to give them away to -- maybe it's a way to meet more of the neighbors.

 Anyway, fruit trees are definitely a good investment. Pears need very little attention. I understand it's pretty much impossible to do apples organically, but I've never used any chemicals on my trees and I get some insect-damaged fruit but not enough to really matter. Maybe the bugs just haven't found me yet but so far it's been a pretty free ride.

If you have a yard, you should try it. You can get dwarf varieties that don't take up much space. And they have beautiful blossoms in the spring -- they're just as ornamental as they are edible.

Electricity

 I don't know how much it was national news, but tropical storm Isaias basically wiped out the electrical grid in Connecticut. Many towns were pretty much 100% without power, mine among them. The electric company failed to prepare for the storm, and it took them a solid week to get most customers service restored, and as of this writing, 9 days later, some are still waiting.

I got my power back after almost exactly 7 days. I don't know if I can adequately describe what an ordeal that was. All of us out here get our water from wells, and no electricity means no water. I had stashed a five gallon jerry can with water for toilet flushing etc., and I could refill my potable water bottle at my neighbors' house, who have a generator. But I couldn't bathe, shave, or clean anything. I charged my devices at the neighbors' in the mornings, but only got about an hour use of my computer each day, so I couldn't really work. All I could do at night was read by flashlight. I couldn't irrigate my garden, it's been very dry here, so the garden suffered. (The tropical storm gave us plenty of wind but not much rain.) Yesterday, I had to toss the entire contents of my refrigerator on the compost heap. Some of it, I couldn't even tell what it was.

Now, if you think about it, electricity can't possibly be a necessity, right? I don't know when it first made it out here but probably not until 1920 or so. People managed to cook, eat, defecate, clean and bathe as well as operate their farms and offices. But of course everything was set up to make that possible. They had hand-pumped wells, wood or coal-fired cookstoves, mechanical typewriters, kerosene lamps, outhouses, they ate fresh vegetables from their own or neighbors farms during the harvest season and lived off canned goods, root cellars, and the occasional slaughtered livestock the rest of the year. 

But now it's impossible to live without it. You're forced to adapt eventually -- Puerto Ricans who were without power for the better part of a year after hurricane Maria managed to survive, but  it must have been damn hard. One week was more than enough for me. I'm buying a standby generator, which is expensive, but I can't go through this again. (A small portable generator from Home Depot wouldn't do the job for me because it couldn't operate the well pump, refrigerator and range, let alone give me any additional circuits.) But a lot of people, most actually, can't afford that. So they'll just have to suffer through the next storm.

Testing, 1, 2, 3 . . .

So as part of the plan to ostensibly re-open the university in the fall, the authorities required all faculty who want to show up on campus to get a Covid-19 test. This meant I had to drive in to Providence for that purpose only, and find my way to a location that was nearly isolated from the universe by the pattern of 1-way streets. It was off Thayer St., which is essentially the Main St. of college town with the typical shops and restaurants that cater to students and faculty, so the idea is that ordinarily people would walk there. They had taken over what had been a sandwich shop and the menu board was still visible.

They had four employees there. One was at the front entrance. She checked me in, looked at my official picture ID apparently because of the danger that someone might impersonate me in order to get this test, took my temperature, and handed me a bar coded tag. I then had to take that to a second employee who sat alone at a 15 foot table, whose sole job was to hand me a zip-loc bag containing the swab. I then walked down to the end of the room where a third employee stood to let me know when it was safe to proceed to the test site. Although I was the only person in the entire place, I was made to wait five minutes.

I finally walked down the hall to find a fourth employee who instructed me in how to administer the test myself. It's fairly uncomfortable -- you have to shove this long swab up your nose, much longer than a Q-tip, past the nostrils into the sinus, and twirl it around for 15 second, on both sides. Then she put the swab in a vial, stuck on the bar code, and I left. At that rate, assuming these folks are reasonably well paid, it would cost maybe 50 bucks a test not counting the lab fees and assuming they are paying rent and electricity. On the other hand there's no obvious reason why there were more than two people there.

I actually live in Connecticut, where we are getting 5 stars for our testing effort. However, I would not have been able to get a test in Connecticut because I have no symptoms, and not in a congregate setting such as nursing home or prison, and do not live in a vulnerable urban community. Were I not on the faculty of Brown University, I would need to call my primary care physician, report symptoms, and get a referral. If I did not have a primary care physician I'm not sure what I would be required to do. I got the results in two days, which is considered not bad but were I contagious that would be two days too long. I wasn't actually worried about it because I knew my chances of being infected were infinitesimal.

Still, this gives me a few things to think about regarding privilege (think pro sports also) and the appropriateness and adequacy of our testing regime, even in a state that's been exceptionally successful at squashing the epidemic.

The dying of the light

So, I visited my mother today for the first time in months. She's in a nursing home about an hour away and they shut it down to visitors in March. Then she got sick with Covid-19. We didn't think she'd survive, but she got through it. However, it knocked her down and she can't get up.

Before she was walking (with a walker) freely around the hall, getting herself to the bathroom, dressing herself, feeding herself. Now she can't walk, and I'm not sure she really knew who I am. She's sad but otherwise there's nothing going on. She isn't really aware of the world and can't really have a conversation. The flame is flickering.

This has not always been a part of the human condition. Until maybe the mid 20th Century, nobody survived long in her condition. I get the account of her monthly billings from the insurance company and it's typically many thousands of dollars. Personally, I wouldn't live that way. The trouble is, by the time you get there, you can't make your own choices any more. I don't have the answer.

My mother was a schoolteacher who knew everybody in town, whose students and their parents remembered her and loved her and kept in touch. She had a worthwhile life, until my father's years-long terminal illness that pretty much squeezed the juice of life out of her. But she hung on for the next ten years. Now the end is coming.