June

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, macrophotography, photography, Sunflowers

A field of sunflowers in Bulloch County, Georgia

In June, the sunflowers are in bloom in South Georgia. In Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold finds himself reminiscing about a fishing idyll on Alder Fork in A Sand County Almanac:

“In the fresh of the morning, when a hundred whitethroats had forgotten it would ever again be anything but sweet and cool, I climbed down the dewy bank and stepped into the Alder Fork. A trout was rising just upstream. I paid out some line–wishing it would always stay thus soft and dry–and, measuring the distance with a false cast or two, laid down a spent gnat exactly a foot above his last swirl. Forgotten now were the hot miles, the mosquitoes, the ignominious chub. He took it with one great gulp, and shortly I could hear him kicking in the bed of wet alder leaves at the bottom of the creel.”

“Another, albeit larger, fish had meanwhile risen in the next pool, which lay at the very ‘head of navigation,’ for at its upper end the alders closed in solid phalanx. One bush, with its brown stem laved in the middle current, shook with a perpetual silent laughter, as if to mock at any fly that gods or men might cast one inch beyond its outermost leaf.”

Macro shot of sunflower . . .

Leopold continues his reminiscence, and closes with:

“I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit in their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creek, but my memory. Like the whitethroats, I had forgotten it would ever again be aught but morning on the Fork.

Macro of the ripening seeds . . .

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May

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, Ecology, Environment

Plover by Charles W. Schwartz

It’s May in Wisconsin and clearly Aldo Leopold has a great love of birds, as this month he chronicles the return of the plovers from “the Argentine”:

“When dandelions have set the mark of May on Wisconsin pastures,” he writes, “it is time to listen for the final proof of spring. Sit down on a tussock, cock your ears at the sky, dial out the bedlam of meadowlarks and redwings, and soon you may hear it: the flight-song of the upland plover, just now back from the Argentine.”

Once the plover has landed, it surveys its domain:

“There he sits;” Leopold writes, “his whole being says it’s your next move to absent yourself from his domain. The county records allege that you own this pasture, but the plover airily rules out suck trivial legalities. He has just flown 4000 miles to reassert the title he got from the Indians, and young plovers are a-wing, this pasture is his, and none may trespass without his protest.”

By August, Leopold says, the young plovers will have graduated from flight school and the birds will wing their way, once again, toward the pampas.

“Hemisphere solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky,” he writes.

Leopold ends by saying: “In farm country, the plover only has two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.

“There was a time in the early 1900’s when Wisconsin farms nearly lost their immemorial timepiece, when May pastures greened in silence, and August nights brought no whistled reminder of impending fall. Universal gunpowder, plus the lure of plover-on-toast for post-Victorian banquets, had taken their toll. The belated protection of the federal migratory bird laws came just in time.”

The plover, fortunately, was luckier than the carrier pigeon, for example. And since 1963, we’ve managed to eliminate nearly 40 more species of birds, fish, amphibians, molluscs, plants, mammals, and insects in North America alone.

That number will continue to grow as our population continues to expand. According to population estimates recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 328 million people rang in the new year in the United States. This is an increase of more than 2 million people from the previous year.

The growth was concentrated in western and southern states, where communities and wildlife have felt increasing pressure from drought, severe weather, threats to public land and unsustainable development, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Wildlife and wild places face pressures from a rapidly growing population as politicians and corporations gun to open public lands in high-growth areas to toxic mining, drilling and fracking,” said Kelley Dennings, a population campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Runaway growth and development will harm irreplaceable natural and cultural treasures and our incredible biodiversity.”

Red wolves and Florida panthers in the south, Mount Graham red squirrels in Arizona, and Humboldt martens in California are just some of the species that are facing extinction.

When are we going to start taking seriously the loss of all these creatures?

April

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, Nature

By Charles W. Schwartz

“The same logic that causes big rivers always to flow past big cities causes cheap farms sometimes to be marooned by spring floods,” Aldo Leopold writes in his opening to his chapter on April. “Ours is a cheap farm, and sometimes when we visit it in April we get marooned.”

Later, he continues, “The enthusiasm of geese for high water is a subtle thing, and might be overlooked by those unfamiliar with goose-gossip, but the enthusiasm of carp is obvious and unmistakable. No sooner has the rising flood wetted the grass roots than here they come, rooting and wallowing with the prodigious zest of pigs turned out to pasture, flashing red tails and yellow bellies, cruising the wagon tracks and cow-paths, and shaking the reeds and bushes in their haste to explore what to them is an expanding universe.

“Unlike the geese and the carp, the terrestrial birds and mammals accept high water with philosophical detachment.”

Continuing on the subject of the April floods, Leopold writes, “The spring flood bring us more than high adventure; it brings likewise an unpredictable miscellany of floatable objects pilfered from upriver farms.”

Among those pilfered items are boards: “Our lumber pile, recruited entirely from the river, is thus not only a collection of personalities, but an anthology of human strivings in upriver farms and forests.”

“I know of no solitude,” he writes, “so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.”

Draba

Another April sign announcing the coming of spring is a small flower.

“Within a few weeks now Draba,” Leopold writes, “the smallest flower that blows, will sprinkle every sandy place with small blooms.”

He continues a bit later: “Draba plucks no heartstrings. Its perfume, if there is any, is lost in the gusty winds. Its color is plain white. Its leaves wear a sensible wooly coat. Nothing eats it; it is too small. No poets sing of it. Some botanist once gave it a Latin name, and then forgot it. Altogether it is of no importance–just a small creature that does a small job quickly and well.”

Bur Oak savanna in Wisconsin hill country.

“Each April before the new grasses had covered the prairie with unburnable greenery,” Leopold writes, “fires ran at will over the land, sparing only such old oaks as had grown bark too thick to scorch.” And thus a battle between the forest front and prairie was ignited, each vying for each other to take over the land.

Later, he continues, “But the average battle line between prairie and forest was about where it is now, and the net outcome of the battle was a draw.

“One reason for this was that there were allies that threw their support first to one side, then to the other. Thus rabbits and mice mowed down the prairie herbs in the summer, and in the winter girdled any oak seedlings that survived the fires. Squirrels planted acorns in fall, and ate them all the rest of the year. June beetles undermined the prairie sod in their grub stage, but defoliated the oaks in their adult stage.”

“In the 1840s,” he later writes, “a new animal, the settler, intervened in the prairie battle. He didn’t mean to, he just plowed enough fields to deprive the prairie of its immemorial ally: fire. Seedling oaks forthwith romped over the grasslands in legions, and what had been the prairie region became a region of woodlot farms.”

John Muir grew up during this era, and in his Boyhood and Youth he writes:

“The uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies produced so close and tall a growth of grasses for fires that no tree could live on it. Had there been no fires, these fine prairies, so marked a feature of the country, would have been covered by the heaviest forest. As soon as the oak openings were settled, and the farmers had prevented running grass-fires, the grubs [roots] grew up into trees and formed tall-thickets so dense that it was difficult to walk through them, and every trace of the sunny [oak] ‘openings’ vanished.”

Woodcock

“I owned my farm for two years before learning that the sky dance is to be seen over my woods every evening in April and May,” Leopold writes.

“The show begins on the first warm evening in April at exactly 6:50 p.m. The curtain goes up one minute later each day until 1 June, when the time is 7:50.”

“The stage must be an open amphitheater in woods or brush,” he continues later, “and in its center there must be a mossy spot, a streak of sterile sand, a bare outcrop of rock or a bare roadway.”

And then: “Knowing the place and the hour, you seat yourself under a bush to the east of the dance floor and wait, watching against the sunset for the woodcock’s arrival. He flies in low from some neighboring thicket, alights on the bare moss, and at once begins the overture: a series of queer throaty peents spaced about two seconds apart, and sounding much like the summer call of the nighthawk.

“Suddenly the peenting ceases and the bird flutters skyward in a series of wide spirals, emitting a musical twitter. . . . Then, without warning, he tumbles like a crippled plane, giving voice in a soft liquid warble that a March bluebird might envy. At a few feet from the ground he levels off and returns to his peenting ground, usually to the exact spot where the performance began, and there resumes his peenting.

“It is soon too dark to see the bird on the ground, but you can see his flights against the sky for an hour, which is the usual duration of the show.”

Woodcock by Charles W. Schwartz

Leopold concludes: “The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.”

 

#MeToo?

Tags

#MeToo, Atlanta, Gender Equality, Movies, Television, The Favourite, The Mule, Women

I’m interrupting my previously scheduled book series (on A Sand County Almanac) to bring to your attention an upsetting day I had this week. Spoiler Alert: I talk about the movie, The Favourite, as well as Episode 9, North of the Border, of the series, Atlanta.

The Favourite

As most of us are aware, the #MeToo movement has ignited some changes, particularly within the world of media. On Thursday, my husband and I went to see The Favourite before it left the theaters as it has 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

And, while the acting was brilliant, particularly by the rightfully-nominated Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone, we still left the theater absolutely appalled. Why? Because not one of those characters had any redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Queen Anne, Lady Sarah, and Abigail were portrayed as Narcissistically selfish and petty. Because Queen Anne has lost 17 children from miscarriage, still birth and early childhood death, one should feel pity for her travails, at least. But she is used mercilessly by her childhood friend, Lady Sarah. And eventually she pays that abuse back in kind. Lady Sarah isn’t just mean to the queen, she is mean to everyone around her. And Abigail goes about securing a place of safety for herself, which, while understandable to a point, is still over-the-top selfish. When she goes beyond that point, though, I lose all sympathy for her. By the end of the movie, I felt they deserved what they got.

And that’s all well and good for fictionalized characters (the movie isn’t supposed to be historically 100% accurate), but what does it say about women in general? While the men, from Lord Marlborough to Harley to Masham, are trying to save England in their various ways (and don’t get me wrong, Harley is definitely a jerk in the movie), they aren’t doing what they are doing for completely selfish reasons.

So why? The screenplay was co-written by a woman. Why have you portrayed women in such an unflattering way?

Atlanta (although they are actually in Hapeville not Statesboro where this scene takes place)

Once home from the movie, and after bitching about it for a while, we decided to watch an episode of the series Atlanta because we hadn’t been able to watch it the previous night as Hulu always does this weird thing–not letting us back in if we’ve exited it. First World problems.

Needless to say, that was a bad decision. The episode is called “North of the Border”. I am assuming that’s supposed to be metaphorical because Paper Boi, Earn, Darius, and Tracy head to Statesboro (where Georgia Southern University, from which I was graduated, is located) to play a Pajama Jam for free. Once again needless to say: chaos reigns as it does on most episodes of this series.

And, once again, we were thoroughly upset by the end of the episode. Why? Because once again we had to watch women (in this case, just one) being portrayed as incredibly selfish and petty. In this episode, the woman in question is portrayed as being not quite sane. Fair enough–a lot of people are. Her insanity is related directly to Paper Boi and she freaks out when he is talking to another woman (a fan) during the Pajama Jam.

She dumps a drink on Paper Boi’s head, Tracy pushes her down the stairs, Earn catches her, she punches Earn in the face, and the next thing you know they are running for their lives. Fair enough–things weren’t handled well but that should have been the end of it.

Instead, Paper Boi really needs some weed so they sniff their way to the KA House (okay, that’s not what they call it, but what other fraternity is borderline white supremacist in South Georgia?) where Al smokes weed on a sofa beneath a Confederate flag. And I’m not even going to mention the naked pledges whose heads are covered with burlap bags. Things are already weird enough.

Let’s cut to the next morning when the guys arrive back at the apartment where they were supposed to spend the night (one of residents is the crazy girl), and find their car broken into and all their gear tossed out on the lawn. And this is the point where I got upset again. Why? Because Crazy Violet didn’t just shred Paper Boi’s clothing, but she cut all their clothing to shreds, including shoes. And she stole Earn’s laptop and Al’s weed.

You know, I would have bought her trashing Paper Boi’s things because that is who she felt she had a connection with, and he disappointed her. Crazy, yes, but I can see it. But everyone else’s stuff too? She wasn’t that crazy and I’m sorry that really doesn’t speak well for women. The message is: watch how you treat women or you will come to deeply regret it. How about: do unto others as you would have them do unto you?

By this point, it’s beginning to look like women have no redeeming value. At all. Ever. So, why not watch a female comedian? That should help, right?

Urzila Carlson

We decided to watch a female comedian from New Zealand who turned out to be from South Africa but that didn’t matter. And she was funny. Until.

Until she started a bit about women knowing how to argue better than men because they can hold onto and will bring up things that upset them in the past. It basically came down to women terrorizing men over past mistakes. And after the day we’d had, that was too much.

I won’t deny that that is a style of argument. What I will argue is that that type of argument is not gender-related. How people argue is based on a number of different things and can vary from the conflict avoidant to the physical. But both men and women can be conflict avoidant (I’m in that camp) and both men and women can get physical when they argue. The whole point of the gender equality movement is that we are all the same and we are all different but it has nothing to do with whether we are male or female.

So why in the era of #MeToo are we portraying women in the worst light possible?

And now, before I step down off my soap box, I just want to give a nod to another problem that needs to be tossed in the garbage can–movies in which men of a certain age (past 40) are coupled with women half their age or worse.

The Mule

A prime example of this is a movie now in the theaters–The Mule. Clint Eastwood both directs and stars in this, which is why the 88-year-old (whose character is 90) has not one, but two, threesomes with 20-somethings during the movie. Seriously? They are old enough to be his great granddaughters. That is sick. And he was okay with that.

Here is an excellent article on the phenomenon of the self-loving actor/director: You’re so Vain

Next week: Back to humankind’s attempt to destroy the earth and Aldo Leopold’s attempt to give us a glimpse of how much we have to lose if we do so.

March

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, photography

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is spring,” Aldo Leopold begins his chapter on March in A Sand County Almanac.

Canada geese by Charles W. Schwartz

While ruminating on the yearly patterns of geese, Leopold wonders, “Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his [awareness] is soon a pile of feathers.”

In warmer climes, one can find Canada geese year-round, but in Leopold’s Wisconsin, they appeared only twice yearly to proclaim the arrival of two seasons–winter and spring.

“November geese are aware that every marsh and pond bristles from dawn till dark with hopeful guns, ” he writes. March geese, on the other hand, are a different story.

“They wind the oxbows of the river, cutting low over the now gunless points and islands, and gabbling to each sandbar as to a long lost friend.”

Later, Leopold writes, “Once the first geese are in, they honk a clamorous invitation to each migrating flock, and in a few days the marsh is full of them. On our farm we measure the amplitude of our spring by two yardsticks: the number of pines planted, and the number of geese that stop. Our record is 642 geese counted in on 11 April 1946.”

Leopold later discovers that “goose flocks are families, or aggregations of families, and lone geese in spring are probably just what our fond imaginings had first suggested. They are bereaved survivors of the winter’s shooting, searching in vain for their kin.”

Our daughter, at 11 months, visiting with the geese.

Canada geese were very much a part of our life when we lived on Dews Pond near Calhoun, Georgia. They often nested in our yard and that of our neighbor, and we would look forward to the time when the goslings would emerge from the eggs. They became so tame that they would eat from our hands, and we would spend hours watching their antics. To this day, the honk of a goose brings back fond memories.

In Savannah, March sees the blossoming of our daffodils and crocuses.

And the loquats that were beginning to ripen in January are finally edible.

February

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, history, photography

Illustration for A Sand County Almanac by Charles W. Schwartz

Aldo Leopold begins his chapter on February this way:

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

Wendell Berry would agree.

He continues, “To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.

“To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride a radiator.”

A mackerel-scaled February sky signals an impending winter storm.

I was fortunate enough to have lived on a very small-scale farm during a few of my teenage years. Although we had a garden, our cows (and at one point, pigs) accounted for more of our diet than vegetables. Having helped slaughter, clean, and grind meat, I am now always keenly aware from whence my meat comes (which is one reason I am attempting to eat less of it).

The house we lived in at the time (Briarpatch) was heated by wood stoves. That meant a large portion of the year, after school and on weekends, was dedicated to cutting and hauling wood to be later burned in those stoves. It was never easy but it was particularly difficult when it was cold and my numbed fingers could barely feel the logs I was hoisting into my arms.

Following college, I was once again reminded about heat when my husband and I spent a winter either crouched before the fire place or locked in a room with a space heater when the gas company refused to turn on our heater because they didn’t want to be responsible for a possible leak. Although we were both employed by a daily newspaper, we were still too poor to have the heater fixed and had to suffer through a colder than normal mid-Georgia winter, in which the temperatures plummeted more than 6º below 0º Fahrenheit.

A view from a February morning walk around Daffin Park.

In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold takes us back in time as he discusses the history of the oak that is burning in his fire place. When the tree was cut, he calculated that it was a seedling about 1865, at the end of the Civil War. But, he writes, the acorn that produced it most likely fell during the preceding decade “when covered wagons were still passing over my road into the Great Northwest.”

A bolt of lightning put an end to the 80-year-old tree during a July thunderstorm. Leopold and his family let the wood season for a year “in the sun it could no longer use” and eventually felled it on a crisp winter’s day.

“Fragrant little chips of history spewed from the saw cut,” he wrote, noting that the saw was carving its way “into the chronology of a lifetime, written in concentric annual rings of good oak.”

The from the reign of the bootlegger who had previously owned his farm in the 1930s, forced out by the Dustbowl droughts of that era, Leopold takes us back to the 1920s. From 1929 when the stock markets crumpled to 1925 when Wisconsin saw the demise of the last marten to 1922 and the “Big Sleet” of March, that tore the limbs from the surrounding elms.

Further back, from 1910 to 1920, the oak continued to grow despite even as the Supreme Court abolished state forests in 1915. In 1910, “a great university president published a book on conservation (Charles Van Hise, University of Wisconsin-Madison), and then 4 years earlier (1906) when the first state forester took office not knowing state forests would be abolished not even a decade later. That same year, fires burned 17,000 acres of the sand counties.

The ring from 1899 was mute about the last passenger pigeon, which had “collided with a charge of shot near Babcock”, two counties to the north of Leopold. 1893 saw the year of “The Bluebird Storm” when a March blizzard killed nearly all of the migrating bluebirds.

Chickadee illustration by Charles W. Schwartz.

Then further back–1890–and the year of the Babcock Milk Tester and why Wisconsin is known as “America’s Dairyland” today. The previous year, a drought year in Wisconsin, was the year Arbor Day was first proclaimed. At the beginning of that decade, in 1881, the Wisconsin Agricultural Society debated the question: How do you account for the second growth of black oak timber that has sprung up all over the county in the last thirty years?

“My oak was one of these,” Leopold writes.

The decade of the 1870’s saw Wisconsin’s “carousal in wheat”. By the end of the decade, farmers realized that they had lost the game of “wheating the land to death.”

“I suspect that this farm played its share in the game,” Leopold writes, “and that the sand blow just north of my oak had its origin in over-wheating.”

1874 saw the arrival of the now ubiquitous factory-made barbed wire. Finally the rings have reached the center of the tree:

“Our saw now cuts the 1860’s,” writes Leopold, “when thousands died to settle the question: Is the man-man community lightly to be dismembered? They settled it, but they did not see, nor do we yet see, that the same question applies to the man-land community.”

The pith of the oak, 1865, is the year that John Muir offered to buy the home farm from his brother. Thirty miles east of Leopold’s oak, this land was a sanctuary for the wild flowers that had gladdened Muir’s youth. While his brother refused to sell the farm John, the dream remained, and as Leopold notes, “1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birthyear of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.”

A February day at Honey Creek on the Georgia salt marshes.