Waypoints

Community Grafting

2011-10-09T21:07:00.000-07:00

Community Grafting is an approach to collaborative social action that ties disconnected sectors together in a permanent, mutually beneficial way.

The basic premise of Community Grafting is that all economic sectors of society (business, government, public charities, churches, the individual---these days almost its own institution---universities, and whomever else we can name) have been disconnected from one another by virtue of their roles in our present, competitive economy (See: Wendell Berry, et al). Yet all sectors, and everyone within them, share a fundamental responsibility for what's wrong with the whole and for fixing it.

Solving such comprehensive problems will take comprehensive solutions---not necessarily at global scales, but resourced in a way that can at least approach the scale of their effects.

For this effort, each sector will have to buy into a piece of the solution in a way that doesn't prevent it from pursuing its own goals in the near term. A community grafting project first acknowledges the need for immediate benefits to all parties; it must contain inherent incentives that can compete with the kinds of rewards participants typically pursue within their individual spheres. Investment is unsustainable without this.

In the long term, Community Grafting implies the creation of common goods (solutions, relationships); but the good it brings must be an emergent property of each participant meeting its own needs. It understands that work toward any shared solution must occur simultaneously between our isolated and sometimes competing interests.

The metaphor for a solution looks like this, to me:

Two parts, each incomplete without the other, mended in a permanent and ultimately fruitful way. The leaves at different stages of development reflect the union enduring and renewing over time.

The components of any Community Grafting project would include, at least:

Participants from multiple sectors, especially local businesses and nonprofits. Also welcome are municipal and state agencies, elected officials, universities, volunteers, etc., provided real incentives for each exist within the project.
Measurable gains and/or met objectives that are relevant to each partner's sector. Shared goals and measures are not essential; the good that comes from community grafting is an emergent property of participants' needs being met. (This is similar to and draws from the concept of ecosystem health, whereby the successful meeting of many individuals' needs both stems from and contributes to the perpetuation of the system.)
Frank and frequent communication in a common language (avoiding sector-specific jargon, theories and paradigms) as a tool to assure participants' needs are known and being met, and that changes be addressed.
Friendships and sustained partnerships that support future projects of different kinds but with the same devotion to mutual benefit.

In this way, the greatest common denominator between the sectors (people) becomes more obvious. The inhabitants of adjacent sectors can grow more familiar and responsible to one another as neighbors, and by doing so, may better acknowledge and address shared problems.

Implicit in this idea is something I found myself saying recently to a potential corporate investor about the nature of the nonprofit / business relationship. To sum it up: "We can't afford for you to go away." What we do together has to be good for both parties, both now and in the long term, or the partnership will fall apart.

Community Grafting is a way of thinking about collaborations that insists that everyone's motivation be known and respected, and incentives openly pursued.

Some additional principles:

Business is not the enemy

Central to this work are the engines of our economy, those among the 90% of all the employed who work to make a profit, which for most is just another way to say make a living. Businesses that engage in positive action through community grafting should be recognized and rewarded; those that do not, or those that are chief contributors to acknowledged problems, should be kept in the discussion whenever possible. Their input and cooperation is essential; their responsibility shared with the rest of us.

Make Money...
Borrowing from food and culture journalist Michael Pollan's succinct "eater's manifesto" (i.e., Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants), a guiding ethic of Community Grafting might be stated as: Make Money, Not Too Much, Mostly Give. By this ethic, investment by a broad range of actors can be justified and rewarded (make money) while simultaneously be given guidelines (not too much) and the spirit of the nonprofit endeavor preserved (mostly give).

Single-sector efforts are inadequate

Elected and appointed officials, using our code of laws and regulations, can assist and foster community grafting projects as defined above, but they cannot compel progress any more effectively than other sectors.

Policy change by itself is incapable of creating permanent, positive societal change. Successful policy should include both near-term benefits and long-term rewards for everyone it affects.

Likewise, business-only investments and collaborations to create positive social change will find insufficient near term incentives and shareholder rewards to sustain them.

University-led projects can offer sound analysis and useful concepts, but are often alienated from their communities by academic culture and may compete directly for funding with other partners.

In all cases, incentives to investment that are appropriate for each sector must be found and nurtured. A Community Grafting project should first and last be good for all parties.

The year in review

2006-06-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

I plan to wrap up this project today, just a year after launch but not too soon I think. My thanks to everyone who came to visit, read and contribute to this blog.

Waypoints opened at the end of June, 2005, the day I turned 35. I wanted to keep the process going that led to the birth of my last book and maybe to spark a new one. Something like that might have happened; one post or another could germinate and blossom into something good. But if I don't write another book, maybe you (or you or you or you) will. I hope so!

I've spent the past year mostly watching my kids grow and worrying about them, which is normal. Worry is the necessary partner of love. I've been flying my hawks and worrying about them, too, which is nothing new for me. But for the first time, I fret now about the near future of my hunting---everyone's hunting, everyone's access to animals and to places where animals are. There seems to be a culture-wide pulling away from these most important things. To my inner ear it sounds like cloth ripping.

We are paving and posting and fencing like mad in Baton Rouge and everywhere I know. The "Animal Rightists" are louder and more accomplished than ever, seeming to find their message better received today, so accustomed we are to sales talk. Too few of us think about animals anyway; what use are our own opinions?

How will our governments---local and national---conclude their apparent efforts to see that no one grows an egg to eat, or keeps a pigeon, kills a hog, or owns a dog. What's next: a vegetable registry? A canning ban? The Wild Berry Protection Act?

What will my kids do for a living when their schooling's done? What for fun? Is it too much to expect those could be the same?

To these worries my aging friend Ida says, "Oh, it'll all come out in the wash." But she's a fatalist and doesn't have much to lose at this point. She has no children. The world is already unrecognizable to her.

But I'm not here to bring you down! In fact I think we'd all do better to cheer up. Waypoints are just places in the road. The road continues.

Small brush, big mess?

2006-05-16T07:22:00.000-07:00

Forward-thinking scientists have now invented brushes small enough to tidy up microscopic spills. Why would you need something like that?

"We need to look at the needs in the nano-world, where machines and materials can be the size of atoms and molecules," said UH doctoral student Vinod P. Veedu. "As in the 'bigger' world, there are messes to sweep, walls to paint, tubes to unclog and electronics to power. So our invention ... demonstrates a way to make the tiniest of brushes to do these jobs."

Messes to sweep!

Tomatoes a'la B

2006-05-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

This has become a May tradition, a couple years running at least: broiled tomatoes with cheese as an after school snack.

Thanks to Tom Coulson for the tomato lore and continued horticultural mentoring.

Plants go in in early March; begin to fruit in mid-April.

A few days on the sill...

Pepper, mozzerella and feta cheese, olive oil; 10 minutes at 400...

Nuff said...

While waiting...

2006-05-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

...for my wife and kids to return from their weekly trip to Wal-Mart, a 132 year old general store in New York state went up for sale.

What's a general store? The author of this piece (rightly, I bet) guessed you'd need an explanation:

"[Owner Jim Marilley's] store once played the role of a rural Wal-Mart between cow farms and the Adirondacks' western edge: Long hours (even until midnight), convenient location, two creaking wooden floors of goods. 'If We don't Have it, You don't Need it!' the sign says."

Now, what's a cow farm?

Uh huh

2006-05-08T13:55:00.000-07:00

That's what I'm talking about.

And for Mardi Gras 2007:

Cross posting

2006-05-07T05:10:00.000-07:00

A Berry-flavored piece I sent to Steve's blog: The Next Big Thing

Banning "canned hunts?"

2006-05-03T05:31:00.000-07:00

Associated Press writer Clare Nullis reported yesterday on South Africa's proposed ban of "canned hunts" and the captive breeding that supplies animals for them.

According to Nullis, "[S.A. Environmental Minister] M. van Schalkwyk said the new laws would stamp out practices that 'have cast a shadow on our phenomenal conservation successes, and left a stain on our reputation as world leaders in protecting and promoting biodiversity.'"

But this legislative effort goes a little farther, and in so doing, suggests more than conservation or biodiversity is at issue.

Breeding threatened or endangered large predators such as cheetahs, lions or leopards for any type of hunting would be forbidden. Also banned would be all hunting that causes unnecessary suffering, such as the use of bows and arrows on large animals that can take hours or days to die...
...The new laws would "close the loopholes that have allowed environmental thugs to get away with immoral activities like canned hunting," he said.

So, immorality and unnecessary suffering; these also are to be banned in South Africa. There's a familiar ring to this rhetoric, and in fact:

The International Fund for Animal Welfare, one of the organizations campaigning for tougher controls, welcomed the draft regulations.

"Let's hope they go far enough to address unethical hunting practices and, in the words of the minister, rid this cancer from society," said Jason Bell-Leask, the organization's southern Africa director.

I wonder how far would be "far enough" for the IFAW, whose work (according to their website,) "leaves hunting exposed for what it is -- a cruel and unnecessary activity that has no place in a modern compassionate society."

As a hunter, I recognize the likes of the IFAW and our own Humane Society of the United States as no friends of mine. Probably the situation is worse than that, though it does little good for civility to brand someone an enemy.

The irony is that I am no supporter of canned hunts; nor would any hunter I know recognize in them the virtues they see in actual (real, wild, free) hunting. In fact, what South Africa seeks to ban is not hunting at all.

Shooting an animal in a pen is simply shooting a penned animal. It matters little how big the pen or "wild" the animal: If someone raised and placed it in the pen for the purpose of being killed, it can only be, technically, a slaughtering. For the same reason are slaughtered animals in this case not game but livestock. The canned hunts (or "hunting preserves," if you prefer) may provide a glorified experience of harvesting produce (if you factor in the gin, the porters and the portable hot tubs), but it is an amputated, incomplete and artificial experience as a hunt.

Confusing the two activitiess is disingenuous and sloppy but good for the goals of anti-hunters. An example from Nullis' report: "In 2004, an estimated 6,700 tourists killed nearly 54,000 animal 'trophies,' according to a report last year that recommended a ban on canned hunting. The report did not say how many of those hunts were 'canned.'"

In this country the connotation of "canned hunting" is narrower and (if possible) even more negative: We think of retired zoo cats being shot beneath pick-up trucks ten feet from the cage they came in. It would be hard to defend that, and some states have banned it without special effort on the part of animal wellfarists. But in fact, the principle being questioned in South Africa is more broad and virtually identical (except in species of concern) to what is practiced on many genteel quail plantations in South Georgia, at partridge shoots in Vermont and on exotic game ranches in Texas and elsewhere. It also, by same principle, implicates legal ownership, breeding and slaughtering of all livestock as part of a cruel and unnecessary system of animal abuse.

The more often our large, well-funded animal rightists organizations achieve their goals, the sooner the scope of those goals will be clear. By then, I expect they believe, it may be too late to deny them.

Breed standard vs. work

2006-05-02T17:20:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Steve at Querencia for noting this wonderful piece by Yvonne McGehee comparing the modern showring Borzoi to the one she remembers and hopes to preserve. I read this not as a student of the Borzoi or even with any particular knowledge of dog breeding; yet it rings true, and it carries its truth to the selective breeding of any animal or plant. Wendell Berry, writing about hill sheep or walking horses or mule teams would hardly be distinguishable in his observations. Note especially the emphasis here on work, Berry's favorite benchmark.

In this passage McGehee describes what it takes to make a "real" Borzoi, and by its omission, what is left of one in the showring:

"The way to go about selection is to first learn, with humility, what a good dog is, based on how he does at his work; and through learning, to acquire a taste for what makes beauty of the particular kind in question. It's the work of a lifetime. If preservation is the goal, the criteria for good has to stem from the two things we have available: history, and work. Work here means whatever work it was that created the breed's form. History from the past and work from the present have to be the foundation. All the frills, the bells and whistles, can be to anyone's subjective liking, but the foundation must be there. To choose for bells and whistles alone is to make a tiney sound."

Upright vs. recliner

2006-05-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

My recumbent bike's Promax rear brake caliper (the little clampy-thing that pinches the disk rotor and stops the rear wheel) fell apart last week after a year of good service. I gather Promax does not make the World's Best Brake Caliper (opinions vary I assume), so failure and the $48.00 replacement might have been expected.

The new part took a week to arrive, so I spent those days riding the old upright, a modestly-priced mountain bike, circa 2001.

A comparison (like the new brake) was inevitable.

I'm surprised to learn that the upright model got me to work faster by a few minutes. My feeling is that the time saved came from the mountain bike's quicker acceleration through campus traffic and its ability to cut corners over curbs, etc. The downside came later, in the long haul: I had to hoof it to maintain forward momentum on the upright---The recumbent holds its speed with much less effort on the part of the rider. So for distance, I'm riding on my tush.

Comfort is no fair comparison. The recumbent is a Cadillac.

...But that nagging feeling of being weird on a weird bike pretty much went away when peddling the more familiar diamond frame. I blended in better, which (sad to admit) I found enjoyable.

Hunters' civil rights and other modern fairy tales

2006-04-28T06:15:00.000-07:00

A Massachusetts law suit seeks unspecified damages for the reading of a "gay-themed fairy tale" to a classroom of public school students. Find the full story by Jason Szep here.

This is not a post about gay couples in Massachusetts, public school education or even lawyers. It's just a vague comment on political correctness, and one hunter's question: Will progressive politics ever embrace the civil rights of people who, for reasons both genetic and of personal choice, like to hunt and eat animals?

Lexington Superintendent of Schools, Paul Ash*: "This school district is committed to a welcoming environment for all kids. We embrace the diverse nature of the community."

Mr. Ash's inclusive impulse is laudable and, I think it's safe to say, a pillar of liberal policy everywhere. So why is it that communities seemingly in greatest support of diversity and inclusiveness (clustered mainly in our crowded West Coast and Northeastern states) are so often strongholds for anti-hunter sentiment? Does this suggest an insurmountable urban/rural conflict? A battle of the sexes? A language barrier?

I don't think so. At least, evidence to the contrary is common enough: All kinds of people hunt, including cityfolk. There are even, I assume, a few California towns without proposed coursing bans.

Maybe it's a failure of the imagination, ours and theirs. We hunters who call ourselves liberals may be most to blame. Somehow we've managed to make our natural, genetically-based (if temporarily recessive) inclination to hunt and eat animals a strange and hostile issue to our talking heads. We've made a time-tested and environmentally sound method of securing good (organic! free range!) food something totally alien to many who call themselves Environmentalists. We've allowed certain prominent conservative personalities to represent "hunting," even if their practice of it bears no resemblance to what we do.

Conservative friends who expect better from their leaders note that the Republican Party is not necessarily going to save hunting. Nor will the Democrats, per se, do much better; room is scarce beneath that multi-colored umbrella of cultural diversity.

Actual hunters will have to save hunting. Now, how?

* as quoted by Szep

An obit for the library?

2006-04-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

I work for a library now, and have, to some extent, since college graduation. Even at the Florida GFC, I was shelving issues of The Auk and Condor when I wasn't chasing little blips attached to Cooper's hawks.

For any reader, writer or lover of old-fashioned things, there are few more agreeable places than a good library. But not all of them are happy places. Many libraries suffer a kind of self loathing, having broke ground in that nether-time between card catalog and Internet. It was an era of green screen terminals and bad graphic art: my adolescence. And it's over.

At some point, closer to the present, the computers left the Reference Desk and wandered around the reading room. No longer standing alone, networked machines whispered to one another, proliferated and gathered intelligence until one finally busted free and became An Internet Terminal. I remember that moment; we got one at the main library of Valdosta State College (now VSU), late in my Junior year. It was a weird and curious and almost useless thing.

Now all computers are Internet terminals and the Net is no longer useless---It's essential. At least, we treat it that way. Most of us get our world news, encyclopedic and technical reference data without leaving home, much less entering a...book...place. Whether the good librarians of my middle school years ever peered at the green screen and feared for the future of their stacks, compact shelving, study carols and circulation desks, I don't know. But these library sine qua non are often empty now, perhaps soon to be simply non.

Marilyn Johnson (from The Dead Beat, again) with a bit no library employee could fail to notice:

"I visit the reading room of the library now only for nostalgic purposes . . . My computer has replaced the library, its big colorful flat screen cluttered with vivid icons, my desk swept free of messy clippings. The browser icon bounces when it needs attention; bells and whistles help me navigate the shoals of the Web. Most days, I don't use my legs, or the rest of my body, either---it's just my eyes and fingers, flashing impulses to my brain as fast as I can type, as fast as the screen can jump. Whenever my connection falters, I go mad."

Pluvialis on being invisible

2006-04-21T19:54:00.000-07:00

A singular mind, the one of its kind, lives in the head of Helen Macdonald. There is no use describing it, this mind, nor the person whose head it sits in... Read the blog. Read the book. Read THIS, in which Helen jotted down just yesterday and for no one in particular how being invisible can be handy when training a hawk:

"...You have to will yourself into invisibility.

Does this sound laughable? Maybe. I learned it as a child, stalking birds, in a rather rudimentary way. But I perfected it over years of training hawks. It’s what you do when a fresh hawk sits on your left fist, unhooded, hungry, with food beneath her feet, in a state of savage, defensive fear. You want her to eat the beef or quail—that first step in reclaiming a hawk that will end with you being hunting partners. But the space between the fear and the food is a vast, vast gulf, and you have to cross it together. I thought, once, that you did it by being infinitely patient. But no: you must do it by becoming invisible.

"Think of it: it’s a darkened room. Say, the bird’s a sparrowhawk. You are sitting with a sparrowhawk on your fist. It is as immobile, as tense and sprung as a catapult at full stretch. Do not underestimate the emotional weight of a bird that weighs seven ounces. Underneath her huge, needly feet is a large chunk of steak. You’re trying to get her to look at the steak, not at you, because you know—though you haven’t looked—that her eyes are fixed in horror at your profile. All you can hear is the wet click, click, click of her blinking.

"To cross this space between fear and food, and to somehow make possible an eventual concord between your currently paralysed, immobile minds, you need — very urgently —not to be there. I can’t describe how this happens. You empty your mind and become very still. You think of exactly nothing at all. The hawk becomes a strange, hollow concept, as flat as a snapshot or a schematic drawing, but at the same time, as pertinent to your future as an angry high court judge. Your gloved fist squeezes the meat a tiny amount, and you feel the tiny imbalance of weight and you see out of the very corner of your vision that she’s looked down at it. And so, remaining invisible, you make the food the only thing in the room apart from the hawk; you’re not there at all. And eventually she’ll start eating, and you can very, very slowly make yourself visible. Even if you don’t move a muscle, and just relax into a more normal frame of mind, the hawk knows. It’s extraordinary. It takes a long time to be yourself, in the presence of a new hawk.

For those outside our peculiar world of falconry, the intimate scene above is fundamental to the sport; it is instantly familiar after training even one hawk. Although every introductory text gives some description of it, none have done it better. And who else but the incomparable Pluvialis would do it to illustrate some other point entirely?

As one writer said once of another: "...she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer."

A good obituary should be

2006-04-20T17:29:00.000-07:00

"Writerly, without a lot of hollow bullshit—that's the secret."

[from Marilyn Johnson's ode to the obit The Dead Beat]

Quote break

2006-04-20T05:08:00.000-07:00

One of the many enjoyments in a reading of Hemingway is to see how poorly the man lives up to his icon. The great writing is a given, but where is this stoic, impenetrable man's man we suppose to be the author? Hemingway's sense of irony, another pleasure for his readers and so much a part of the humor and tragedy in his work, must have appreciated the distance between the writer and what is often written about him.

Hemingway was an aficionado, a lover of art and the arts in general. He wrote with great affection and sometimes familial condemnation of the artists he knew and of their work. His writing on bulls and bullfighters is very much in that spirit. Of course, Hemingway's fascination with this and other deadly dramas (warfare, boxing, hunting) probably earned him the macho reputation.

But if so, what do you make of this? After a captivating account of a friend's battle in the Spanish bullring, and a serious wound taken, Ernesto follows his friend to the hospital:

[from The Dangerous Summer]

Wounded matadors who are going to fight again as soon as possible are given a minimum of sedation. The theory is that they must have nothing that will affect their nerves or their reflexes. In an American hospital they might have kept him out of pain, "snowed" it is called. In Spain pain is quite simply regarded as something a man has to take. Whether the pain is not as bad for a man's nerves as the drug that would stop it is not considered.
"Can't you give him something to ease him?" I had asked Manolo Tamames earlier.
"I gave him something last night," Tamames said. "He's a matador, Ernesto."
He was a matador all right and Manolo Tamames was a great surgeon and a true friend but it is a rough theory when you watch it practiced.

New addition to the family

2006-04-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

Rina

Our new whippet has a way of hiding behind things while doing what we’d rather she didn’t—like chew my socks or nibble her feces. Whippets are circumspect little dogs, always with one eye on you. They will drive you mad by refusing to come when called, or by coming the long way around; or by coming very nearly all the way then stopping just out of reach. You can send one trotting off like a spooked mare with a look. She’ll be back, but not close enough to catch.

We had another whippet fourteen years, a male too old to dodge us by the time our twins were born. Meng might have been a golden retriever for all the children knew. By the age of ten, he would suffer a wet hug from two toddlers rather than leave his warm spot on the couch.

But I remember when… For the first six months of his life, Meng and I played a daily game of tag I never won. He could beat me in a sprint just months after birth, and in his prime, no man nor beast could catch him. As an adult, Meng and I came to terms through our mutual love of hunting. He became the most biddable sighthound I ever knew, so long as abiding me meant another slip on a squirrel or a chance to chase a rabbit.

Now that Meng is gone and Rina owns his spot on the couch, our girls are puzzled by the wild side of her psyche, the side they never saw in Meng.

After scolding Maggie twice for trying to pin the squirming puppy in a headlock, she pursed her lips and asked me, “Why’d we get another dog anyway?” I think she meant, “What good is a dog you can’t hug?”

Coming to us at six months of age, Rina is maybe wilder than most. She was born between the landfalls of hurricanes Katrina and Rita (hence her name), and she suffered the fate of her breeders: the felling of nearly every tree on the kennel property and miles of crushed fencing. Though the family home was spared, it would be months before the breeders could spend more than a few minutes a day with any of their dogs. Nervous by nature already, Rina took this harder than most.

We’ve had her three weeks now and watched her brighten up as the breeder knew she would. Still skittish in sight of her leash and quick to the carry-kennel when the kids hit high gear, Rina also joins me now at the sparrow trap and watches for birds. She sits between us on the couch and lays her head in Shelly’s lap; she sleeps behind our legs in a spot left empty since Meng died.

Why did we get another dog? It's a good question. It may be the best question no one ever needs to answer.

Meng

More from a rough shooting dog

2006-04-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

I'm putting a cap here (maybe) on the meat-eating posts, and with Charles Fergus's help, weaving in a previous thread on what happens when hunting gets too far from its source.

Here Fergus laments a trend he sees among his hunting pals:

"As the seasons passed, I noted something insidious happening to some of my pointing dog friends: They gave up hunting.

[snip]

My friends began giving up their hunting Saturdays for field trials. For 'Futurities' (whatever that meant) and 'Grouse Stakes.' And when they actually ventured into the coverts, they weren't there to kill birds---they were going through the steps of some stylized, removed procedure, among whose rules was to shoot only at birds that had been solidly pointed, which with grouse was a rare situation. As a result, they hardly ate any wild game..."

Or as Fergus says more pointedly earlier, they gave up hunting. It would be an embarrassing position for me to take, as one who delights in watching his hawk eat birds he would not care to eat himself (starlings, crows, grackles, sparrows); but it's also true that I eat---and eagerly, greedily---every game bird my hawk manages to catch and most of the rabbits. This consumption is no longer a token gesture of my hunting, but an active goal, and my hunting is better for that.

Quote break

2006-03-29T17:33:00.000-08:00

Continuing a theme here: On the value of wild meat, which includes the value of hunting and ultimately the value of eating.

This paragraph comes from Charles Fergus' A Rough Shooting Dog. The book was a gift from dog trainer and aspiring falconer Gregg B. Thanks again, Gregg.

"I can believe there is goodness in a deer, a pheasant, a woodcock, a grouse; and perhaps to imbibe the flavor is to assume, in some measure, the nature of the beast. Deer meat is lean and savory. Woodcock is earthy, mud-murky, the breast darkly blooded to sustain the bird on its long migratory flights. Grouse tastes good and of goodness, grape-fed, bud-fed, and indeed it seems possible that I can hoard some of that goodness in my cells. We kill the game to eat it. Tasting it, we thank it. Thanking it, we remember it: how we hunted it, how it tested us, how we overcame it, how it finally fell."

So well said. And yet any talk about thanking the animal for its life now risks the snarky retort, "Some thanks!" You could have taken a picture, after all---Thanked the animal for that.

But the gratitude only makes sense if you eat the beast. It is only right to be thankful for food. That game is such good food, so hard to come by, so honestly got, and so free is all the more to be grateful for.

A journalist on the price of wild meat

2006-03-27T10:30:00.000-08:00

Steve Bodio forwarded this link to a piece by Botany of Desire author Micheal Pollan, a journalist whose upcoming book (The Omnivore's Dilemma) will describe his effort to hunt, gather or grow four complete meals---or to better frame this quest, to pay the actual price of the food we eat.

The excerpt linked above is remarkable for all the reasons Steve cites, and moreso to me since Pollan, not a hunter until taking on this project, manages to express better than I ever have the assault of emotions and intellectual conflict that hunting brings to anyone who does it and cares to think about it. It's an outstanding piece, and I have no doubt the book will be worth having.

I'd like to cut and paste from it maybe a bit more liberally than is the custom. But there is a lot of good stuff to cover.

Here Pollan has introduced the idea of natural "cannabinoids," drugs produced in the brain that mimic the peculiar mental status of the active hunter: calm, alert, dulled somewhat to physical discomforts, and hungry. Maybe it's a stretch or just coincidence, but:

"The experience of hunting suggests another explanation. Could it be that the cannabinoid network is precisely the sort of adaptation that natural selection would favor in the evolution of a creature who survives by hunting? A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time) and makes you hungry would seem to be the perfect pharmacological tool for Man the Hunter. All at once it provides the motive, the reward and the optimal mind-set for hunting. I would not be the least bit surprised to discover that what I was feeling in the woods that morning, crouching against a tree, avidly surveying that forest grove, was a tide of anandamide washing over my brain."

Pollan on why, at base, the topic of hunting is such a great stirrer-up of passions:

"Exactly why we would strive so hard to distance ourselves from our animality is a large question, but surely the human fear of death figures in the answer. What we see animals do an awful lot of is die, very often at our hands. Animals resist dying, but, having no conception of death, they don't give it nearly as much thought as we do. And one of the main thoughts about it we think is, will my own death be like this animal's or not? The belief, or hope, that human death is somehow different from animal death is precious to us — but unprovable. Whether it is or is not is one of the questions I suspect we're trying to answer whenever we look into the eyes of an animal."

On how it is that the aftermath of any hunt, taken out of context and viewed in isolation, tends to shock and even enrage those who do not hunt:

"Like the image of the two filthy hunters I'd caught in the convenience-store mirror earlier that afternoon, Angelo's digital photo had shown me the hunt, and the hunter, from the outside, subjecting it to a merciless gaze that hunting can't withstand, at least not in the 21st century. Yet I'm not prepared to say that that gaze offers the more truthful view of the matter. Angelo's picture resembles in certain respects the trophy photos sent home by soldiers, who shock their brides and mothers with images of themselves grinning astride the corpses of the enemy dead. They are entitled to their pride; killing is precisely what we've asked them to do, so why do we have so much trouble looking at the pictures?"
"...I've looked at Angelo's pictures again, trying to figure out why they should have shamed me so. I realize it isn't the killing it records that I felt ashamed of, not exactly, but the manifest joy I seemed to be feeling about what I'd done. This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting — to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but also to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as if the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion, by industrial agriculture."

Hunting, eating wild birds

2006-03-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

The US Fish and Wildlife Service sent out a notice this week of their intent to seek public comment on a "supplemental environmental impact statement" (SEIS) for the sport hunting of migratory birds, an activity established in international treaty and which they regulate. This SEIS is an official review of agency policy and a very big deal to those of us who hunt migratory birds (doves, ducks, rails, etc.).

My comments are as follows. Please forgive the familiar quotes from our friend Wayne Pacelle (but they're great, aren't they?)

---------------------------------

On Sport and Subsistence Hunting: A Reply to The US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Pending Environmental Impact Statement on the Sport Hunting of Migratory Birds

By Matthew Mullenix, Baton Rouge, LA

"If we could shut down all sport hunting in a moment, we would..."

"Our goal is to get sport hunting in the same category as cock fighting and dog fighting..."

“We are going to use the ballot box and the democratic process to stop all hunting in the United States ... We will take it species by species until all hunting is stopped in California. Then we will take it state by state...”

—The words of Wayne Pacelle, current Chief Executive Officer of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), as quoted by the Associated Press, 12/30/91; the Bozeman, MT, Daily Chronicle, 10/8/91; and Full Cry magazine, 10/1/90

It’s morning in America, and Wayne Pacelle is already having a good day. He wakes early as usual, pours a bowl of vegetarian kibble for his cat and some all-grain Kashi for himself—adds soy milk and a California prune to sweeten. He checks his email between bites and smiles at this item from the US Fish and Wildlife Service: Notice of Intent To Prepare a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on the Sport Hunting of Migratory Birds.

Wayne Pacelle is one of the generals in a culture war most Americans don’t even know has begun. Although our ignorance offers him certain strategic advantage, Pacelle makes no special effort to hide the intentions of the multi-million dollar corporation he heads:

“The HSUS is one actor—albeit a major one—in the larger movement to restructure humanity’s relationship with animals and the natural world…we will honor the highest ethical standards in pursuing our mission, working within the system to advance our objectives. At the same time, we will strive to be nimble, hard-hitting, and aggressive, seizing opportunities as they arise and pushing ahead in a determined way with our proactive agenda. We exist to change the status quo and to change social norms. As such, confrontation and controversy are not to be feared; instead, they are logical consequences of meaningful and effective action.”

—From “Wayne Pacelle's Statement of Beliefs,” delivered 6/1/04

A successful lobbyist, columnist and fundraiser, the media-friendly Pacelle knows this war is one best fought with words. No weapon is more useful, malleable, portable or cost-effective than a carefully chosen phrase. So when the US Fish and Wildlife Service—a supporter of hunting and thus an agent of the enemy—chooses of its own accord to single out “sport hunting” for a special review, Wayne Pacelle could not be more pleased.

He grins and gives his neutered cat an extra scratch behind the ears, careful of that tender spot above the microchip.

How important is the distinction between “sport hunting” and “subsistence hunting” (e.g., that practiced by Alaska’s native peoples) in the Service’s pending inquiry into the management of migratory birds?

It is fundamental. For the likes of Wayne Pacelle (who are in hundreds of thousands and growing in organization), the hunting of animals “for sport” represents the lowest ebb of human morality, a holdover from the Dark Ages and abhorrent in a modern society. The eating of animals they acknowledge as a necessary evil, at least for now.

But it’s not just Animal Rightists and militant vegetarians who make a basic distinction between the value of sport hunting and hunting “for subsistence” (for food): Everyday Americans report greater support for hunters who eat game than for those who hunt for trophies or for recreation. Among residents in Washington State, and commonly elsewhere, the wildlife-issues polling group Responsive Management found that:

“…respondents overwhelmingly felt it acceptable to hunt for the meat (92%)…only 22% said that to obtain a trophy was an acceptable reason to hunt.”

—from Washington Residents’ Opinions on and Attitudes Toward Hunting and Game Species Management, 2002

By codifying a distinction between sport and subsistence hunting in the framing of its review (the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, or SEIS), the Service provides substance to the argument that hunting is, at least for us non-Native-Alaskans, merely a pastime. It suggests the possibility that most hunters of ducks, geese, doves, etc., simply shoot and leave the flopping birds bleeding in the field. Conversely, the same distinction implies that hunting for food is altogether different—not fun—and perhaps a practice to be continued only until more humane means of subsistence can be provided.

I have no idea how Native Alaskans view the recreational value of their hunting for food, but I can attest to mine: I love hunting migratory birds, and I love eating them. I will never do one without the other, unless my hawk (who does my bird-catching) happens to eat the bird first.

I know I am not alone. The eating of migratory birds by those who hunt them “for sport” is altogether the common practice. Dinners of roast dove and duck are as cherished by the recreational hunter as they are by those who feed their families in large part by hunting, a significant constituency in my state of Louisiana. Although it is expressly illegal to leave downed birds in the field (as “wanton waste”), I can name no one who would willingly do so!

To separate the acts of hunting birds and eating them is to establish a false dichotomy and, simultaneously, to weaken the strongest defense for all hunting. Most bird hunters (and all the ones I know) eat birds; whatever our motivations for doing so, however practical or aesthetic or spiritual, our sport is undeniably a form of subsistence hunting. To suggest otherwise is to claim we need not eat wild birds simply because there are other alternatives. Bird hunting as “a pointless activity” is epitomized by this argument, which helped end dove hunting in one state: “There are only two ounces of meat in a mourning dove!”

Our alternatives to eating wild game are many. The variety of foods available to every American is astounding and expanding. But as this bounty expands, its sources constrict to fewer and fewer providers, so that now most of us supply our entire diets from one or two major retailers. Furthermore, our government claims increasing responsibility for the approval, quality, quantity, transport and ultimately the cost of our food. The USDA, FDA and other agencies literally put their stamp on almost everything we eat. And soon, with initiatives like the National Animal Identification System, there may not be a single chicken in America that lives without the blessing of the Federal Government.

I am leading with this to the claim that hunting for food (for migratory birds or any other legal game) is a basic expression of American freedom. It allows me and every other hunter the security—however unnecessary or outdated others believe it to be—of knowing we can provide for the sustenance of our families without undue interference from the government or further lining the pockets of Sam Walton’s family. If we ever felt the need, we might just jump off the map and off the grid: become beholden to no one. I grant you it’s a romantic and impractical idea, but it’s one every American hunter will recognize and wish to keep alive.

The recent notice both I and Wayne Pacelle received via email from the Service asked us to consider three facets of this supplemental EIS in particular:

(1) Harvest management alternatives for migratory game birds to be considered,

(2) Limiting the scope of the assessment to sport hunting (i.e., exclusion of the Alaska migratory bird subsistence process), and

(3) Inclusion of basic regulations (methods and means).

I hope my thoughts on the scope of the assessment and on sport hunting are already clear: I ask that the Service not artificially separate the concepts of “sport hunting” and “subsistence hunting” in its coming review.

On the other issues, I’ll be brief. I believe the current management and harvest system (season dates, population estimation, the Flyway Councils, etc.) are excellent and have proved their worth providing years of sustainable hunting to Americans. With the basic regulations I am equally satisfied, and will add only my wish that they remain based upon sound wildlife science and intend to perpetuate this invaluable resource. I ask this for myself and for my children.

Libertarian on hunting

2006-03-15T07:35:00.000-08:00

This article by Daily Reckoning's Jim Amrhein deserves a read and passing along to the like-minded. We are, possibly, in the majority?

Here's an interesting datum from the piece:

"An independent polling organization (Roper and Starch) found in 2000 that 85% of American adults feel that hunting has a legitimate place in modern society. A full 62% agreed that hunters are the world's leading conservationists."

And his summations:

"The bottom line is this: Like it or not, sport hunting is an incredible boon to American society on multiple levels. But even if it weren't, every true American should be in support of it (thankfully, most are -- not that you'd ever discover this from the meat-hating media). Why? Because it's perhaps the most vivid example in our culture of the exercise of multiple personal freedoms: to carry a gun on public land, to kill within the law, and to consume meat without interference from the USDA or FDA. That's awhole lot of freedom bundled up in one activity.

"Bottom line: Whether you agree with hunting or not, you should support it on principle. After all, how would you feel if the government outlawed something YOU love to do because some PR-savvy fringe group managed to spread enough lies about it through an activist media to make you a minority in the public's eye?"

Whose animals?

2006-03-14T06:38:00.000-08:00

"If we could shut down all sport hunting in a moment, we would." --Associated Press, 12/30/91

"Our goal is to get sport hunting in the same category as cock fighting and dog fighting." --Bozeman (MT) Daily Chronicle, 10/8/91

--Wayne Pacelle, President of the Humane Society of the United States

I've often thought it might be necessary, someday, to fight for my children's rights and opportunity to hunt. I never thought I'd have to fear for their right to own a dog.

But what comes now and from several corners is nothing short of an end to animal ownership, at least for you and me. The ideal of it is preposterous, I admit. Where would people be without their animals? Who would seek to rob kids of their dogs?

Is it possible your childhood on the farm, feeding the chickens, etc. (to say nothing of eating them!), will be the last such childhood in America?

Between the many and various organizations seeking to "liberate" your animals from you; and the local, state and federal governments seeking to monitor, contain and tax them; proliferating legislation narrowing the list of activities in which you can participate with your animal, we may already have lost the fight.

"We have no ethical obligation to preserve the different breeds of livestock produced through selective breeding ...One generation and out. We have no problems with the extinction of domestic animals. They are creations of human selective breeding."

-- Wayne Pacelle, President of the Humane Society of the United States
in Animal People News, 5/1/93

If you want your children to have and know and love animals, both domestic and wild, wake up!

Working the road

2006-03-08T17:24:00.000-08:00

An afterthought to the previous post: The distance traveled and fuel wasted in my truck stem directly from the ease---the absolute insensitivity---of the driving experience. Outside the box, high-density synthetic tires attack the asphalt, crunching gravel and aluminum cans, killing squirrels and burning themselves thin in a thirty-thousand mile crucible. Beneath the hood steel alloys suffer, containing a universe in perpetual explosion, radiating heat through every conductive surface so that only the door handle's safe to touch. Beside the road, a young girl hears a rumble then a roar of passing noise, feels hot wind, squints at the glare, then wrinkles her nose at a fading petrol stench.

Inside the box, I float. The whole process of forward motion is reflected away, at the world.

A cyclist's engine is himself, the sense of movement and the forces applied are fully experienced. A bike boosts the limits of muscle and bone, but by a factor of three or four, not of thousands. It gives a man the reach and power of one horse, or nearly so---not a herd. If speed and ease are much reduced, so are wasted friction, heat, exhaust and noise.

I found a related observation in Wendell Berry's recent essay, "Renewing Husbandry." In this passage he describes his own experience plowing behind teams of horses and mules and how this work changed with the purchase of a tractor:

"Brought up as a teamster but now driving a tractor, a boy almost suddenly, almost perforce, sees the farm in a different way: as ground to be got over by a means entirely different, at an entirely different cost. The team, like the boy, would grow weary, but that weariness has all at once been subtracted, and the boy is now divided from the ground by the absence of a living connection that enforced sympathy as a practical good."

Berry presents in this essay the soil and the farm at large as in need of sympathy and the natural limits known to men and horses yet unfelt by tractors. Without the mercy of limits, the soil grows thin and its health neglected. He says this with greater detail and experience, but in short he means a place gets ugly when it's abused. It occurs to me every day on my commute that the roads between work and home have grown ugly: coarse, buckled, littered and pitted; and that the sensation of floating I get when driving my truck is an illusion.

My year on the sun

2006-03-02T16:07:00.000-08:00

About twelve months ago I bought a recumbent bike called the EZ-Rider from Sun Bicycles. After a month or so of tooling around the block and basically putting it off, I started riding all the way to work (a long-time goal, easily ignored). I am not a "bike person," but to see me now, pedalling in full regalia to work and back again, you could doubt that.

I admit I enjoy it. And over the past year I've learned something of what it takes to keep a bike in shape and to commute on it to work. I might, in fact, be a bike person if that's possible without subscribing to biking magazines or wearing tight, synthetic pants.

After a year of this I have changed little, physically. I weigh a couple pounds less than I did last March. I've earned some muscle in the legs. But I'm a bit surprised and maybe disappointed to be so recognizable to myself. I have not become Lance Armstrong.

Another surprise: I'm almost as embarrassed to be seen biking through campus now as I was the day I started. I still stare straight ahead when passing a crowd. I still feel like a fool at stoplights.

But I am more convinced than ever this is the right way to go to work. It is for everyone who lives within five miles of their workplace. Maybe anyone of any age or weight or fitness could do it: If you can walk two blocks to a neighbor's house, you can bike five miles to the office.

The reasons why you probably don't are obvious: You have a car, and you're paying for it; why leave it in the garage? I can't answer that. I leave mine now, but it's paid for and aging and probably enjoying its partial retirement.

I drove 4,000 fewer miles in it this past year: The first 2,400 could be the commute, but what of the rest? Maybe I'm so bushed after biking home, I just don't go out again. But I'll bet you driving to work let me drive farther, more miles than lie between home and office. With a car you run errands with ease, sometimes twice a day to the same store. You go downtown to lunch and take the long way back. I did that, evidently, in my truck. But I don't make two trips on my bike.

Not for nothing do we love our cars. They are comfortable places to sit; the chair is form-fitted and the air is just right, seventy-six on the nose. We don't get wet in the rain or worry about wild dogs in the dark. The car is a protective shell that moves with us. No box turtle would be without one.

It should not surprise, then, that in the past year my Sun recumbent has become a lot more like my truck. It has changed more than I have. My bike now has headlights and taillights (9 electric blinkers in all, plus maybe 15 reflectors). It has a cooler and a trunk and a place to stow my work clothes. It's got two cup holders, a front fender, a spare tube, an air pump, a lift jack and a cable lock. For Pete's sake, it's got a windshield!

For weather protection I have a new wardrobe, accessorized more thoroughly than I would ever consider otherwise. I check the temperature each morning and don, as appropriate: thermal undies, long pants, ankle straps, thick gloves or thin, headband or skullcap, a throat cover, a second shirt, a windbreaker, high-contrast goggles, a helmet---with a blinker.

Although I won't bike to work in a hard rain, I could. I do it occasionally on the way home. No temperature hot or cold is too extreme, given that I live in Louisiana. For nine days in ten I am nearly as comfy on my bike (this bike, anyway, thusly customized) as in my truck...

I just can't go as far.

Probably, I don't need to.

An actual point of view

2006-03-02T06:39:00.000-08:00

The words of Pulitzer-prize winning author John Patrick Shanley as recorded by Claudia Parsons in this story today:

"Everybody's in their easy chair coming up with the absolutely predictable response to everything that comes out on the national level and I need to see them working harder," Shanley said.

"The first step is that initial doubt, then the next moment comes when somebody tells you to do something and you don't want to do it and you have to defy them," he said. "That to me is an intermediate step for a person and a country and you have to go past defiance to having an actual point of view."

And check out his T-shirt: "I'd Rather Be Huntin..."

Reuters Photo: Pulitzer prize winner John Patrick Shanley

An old game

2006-02-28T08:39:00.000-08:00

Several months ago, Mom and Dad got the girls a couple sets of a game called Mancala. Since then the playing pieces (little flat marbles) have shown up all over the house so that now we have only enough for one set.

Last weekend Dad and I pulled down one of the boards and got enough marbles together to play. I read the directions (incorrectly, come to find out) and we played two quick games, not really getting it but having some fun.

Today Shelly read (actually read) the directions to us, and we started to play it the right way. It's a simple game with a few rules and exceptions, seeming just about half-way between checkers and chess in complexity and basic strategy. It is fun!

It is also old. And widespread. The Wikipedia entry gives a clue to what extent the game is and has been popular around the world. Consider how many ancient cultures can claim a game of this kind:

People unfamiliar with mancala games commonly assume there is a particular game with the name Mancala. This perception is helped by marketing which often fails to differentiate variations or gives meaningless names like "Ethiopian" or "Nigerian". Even names which are rightly associated with certain games, such as "Awari", are frequently lifted and applied to different games.
In fact, the name mancala is the Arab name commonly given to some games of this type; the word comes from the arabic word naqala (literally "to move"). This word is used at least in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, but is not consistently applied to any one game. In the Western world, "mancala" is often seen used as a generic name for the game "kalah". Research in English refers to "games in the mancala family" or "mancala games", rather than "mancala variants" which would imply there is one main mancala game on which the others are based.
Adding to the confusion, widespread mancala games may go by different names in different regions, often with slight rules variations. Then, there are groups that give multiple games the same name; sometimes one is intended to be played by men, another by women. Historically, researchers have had difficulty separating the rules for games apart from strategic implications or favored setups, which has caused additional confusion over which games are distinct, or which names refer to the same game. Because of these considerations, and the fact that mancala games have reached the West from these multiple cultures, it is difficult to establish what names and rules, if any, are the "proper" ones.

Liberian men playing a local version of the game.

My impression is that the rules are somewhat arbitrary, and provided you play by them, not so important as other facets of the game: its pace, simplicity, mixing of strategy and surprise, and the point that two people thirty years in age apart can play it well.

Dad and I needed a little help with the rules, but as typical, B learned them quickly and is a stickler for them. The game can hinge on a couple critical plays or a single random event, even close to the end. You can sometimes "run the table," earning extra turns several times in a row, by thinking ahead a move or two. As soon as B did that once, she was all over it.

Briana contemplating how to spend her free turn.

Maggie (also typical) wished to make up her own rules, like wanting the marbles' colors to matter or all the open spaces to be filled. She wanted me to win because she loves me; she's a giver. But eventually she learned the way (she also likes the free turns) and is playing now by the rules, mostly.

This is everything a game should be, designed over hundreds or thousands of years to make fun and pass a good time with few tools or rules. It is the product of long-term gaming natural selection.

If you get a chance, get a board. Ours is the Cardinal Premier Edition, distributed by Dolgencorp, Inc, TN (but, of course, made in China). Dad bought them for $3.00 each at Dollar General. I found a version of the game online, but after trying to play it this way felt strongly that Mancala in solitaire defeats the point.

Neighborhoods and healthy kids

2006-02-25T07:36:00.000-08:00

Charnicia Huggins of Reuters Health hits a number of Waypoints with this story about how neighborhoods affect young peoples' health:

The neighborhood an adolescent lives in may influence his or her development of obesity, new study findings suggest. Specifically, investigators found that adolescents from close-knit neighborhoods were less likely to be obese.
[snip]
"There is an obesity epidemic in this country and treatment has focused on diet and exercise with relatively little success," study author Dr. Deborah A. Cohen, a senior natural scientist at the Santa Monica, California-based RAND Corporation, said in a company statement. The current findings imply that it may be necessary to "look at the neighborhood environment as potentially very important in controlling the obesity epidemic,"

The "obesity epidemic" is the narrowest possible description of a much larger problem. Our preference for a disease analogy is understandable: It greatly simplifies the phenomenon and suggests a cure might come in a pill or medical procedure. Deborah Cohen's finding of an association between cohesive neighborhoods---where "neighbors get along and are willing to help each other, and many adults are role models for adolescents"---and healthy children is thus surprising. There is no scientific explanation, and we are forced to look to common sense for an answer.

...Cohen speculated that children in neighborhoods with high collective efficacy [ie, cohesion as defined above--MM] may be more likely to play outside rather than sit inside and watch television. Or, she said, "maybe (their) neighborhoods look different," with more parks and fewer fast food restaurants.
Based on the findings, "we need to start looking at our environments," she said, and ask: "Are there places for kids to play? Billboard advertisements for fast foods?"

I live in a housing development that is a "neighborhood" only to the extent that those of us housed here make an effort to treat it that way. There is little in its design (except high housing density) to promote neighborly relations: We have no sidewalks or walking trails and no speed bumps to slow the traffic. There is one playground but no way to reach it except by road. The homes are atomized, separated by fenced yards and edged lawns. The nearest public space to each house is the street, and the best avenue to the street is the driveway. It is a housing development made clearly, and first, for the ease and comfort of drivers.

As a parent of two small children, aged appropriately for riding bikes around the block, I am daily reminded that cars and children don't mix. We have friends in the subdivision, but there's no way to visit them except by sharing the road with automobiles. Evenings after five, when friends are likely home, we walk or bike to them literally at our peril. My kids don protective headgear and follow the rules of the road while I shepherd them, yelling instruction. I may be overcautious, but all along the way our neighbors speed past, coccooned in their cars and cell phone conversations. My children and I are their obstacles.

If kids in other neighborhoods move more freely, it stands to reason they move more often. Likewise if adults could walk or run or bike without the constant threat (if only implied) of being hit by a car, more might do it. Likewise, if each home were less isolated; if public space served more than a single purpose (automotive ease); if there was any place to go in this residential-only zone, we might leave the car at home and go there. Meet some neighbors. Walk a mile back home.

An "epidemic" of obesity won't be solved by gastric bypass surgery. It won't be solved by calling it a disease. In a recent essay [The Purpose of a Coherent Community, from The Way of Ignorance] Wendell Berry lauds and laments our piecemeal approach to societal problems, "The effort is not only defined by the problem but is limited by it. . .Who is polluting the river? Well, among others, we are, we members of Save the River, who flush our toilets and use the latest toxic products only a little less thoughtlessly than everybody else."

There is more to this problem and to its solution than counting calories and eating "lite."

Quote break

2006-02-18T12:31:00.000-08:00

From The Dangerous Summer; Hemingway mostly being himself on an extended visit in Spain for the bullfights. If you liked (as I did) his Death in The Afternoon and The Sun Also Rises (or maybe a closer match is A Moveable Feast), then you'll like this one.

There's a good story to read in this edition, plus a fine and very complete introduction by James Michener, and many quotable passages. Here's one that caught my eye today. Hemingway is driving back to Madrid with a friend:

"We saw some big flights of storks searching daintily for food in the rain and many different kinds of hawks in the wild country. Hawks always make me happy and they were all out in the wild weather having a hard time making a living as the wind held the ground birds so close to cover."

How many people would come to any conclusion at all about the kind of day the hawks were having? The man had his eyes open.

A chink in the armor

2006-02-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

Thankfully, Margaret's condition continues to improve---confirming everything I know about her strength and character and that of the good people caring for her. There may be permanent damage to the left eye and surrounding nerves, but we still have reason to hope for a full recovery.

However unexpected, Grandmother's mugging is not inexplicable. Her case fits a familiar pattern, and from the standpoint of one who knows something of predatory behavior, it represents an obvious opportunity. Isolation and infirmity make us vulnerable.

In contrast, evidence of belonging and vigor broadcast the strength of a living system, be it a marriage, a family, a flock or a forest. Healthy living systems are made of active parts, engaging each other and the space they share. Knowledge and energy are eagerly swapped, needs are known and met inside a circle of mutual dependence. But as parts are lost or needs made impossible to meet from within, the system strains. A breach forms in the cell and the viruses get to work.

There's probably a limit to which the disease model can be used to describe broad social or environmental problems, but it makes a tempting metaphor. It even works when thinking of a cure; whatever fixes we supply after the fact will be less effective than having never become ill in the first place.

A recent medical study reported by Robert Roy Britt, Managing Editor of LiveSience.com, provides an example of living systems under strain. It relates specifically to the effects of one spouse's illness on the other, but the implications for extended family and close friends are considerable, I think:

"When a person over 65 is debilitated, the odds of dying within a year can increase dramatically for the spouse, a new study shows.

[snip]

"This highly innovative study in an enormous sample of older people demonstrates yet another important connection between social networks and health," said Richard Suzman, associate director of the National Institute on Aging, which supported the research. "We don't yet know the full extent to which social networks affect health. We need to explore the mechanisms behind the stresses.

"The study confirms the 'widower effect' that has been shown in other research. For those over age 65, the death of a wife increases a husband's risk of death 53 percent for 30 days, and the death of a husband increases his wife's risk by 61 percent during that month, according to the new study.

[snip]

"Spouses suddenly charged with providing more care can be just as suddenly without social, emotional or economic support, Christakis points out. They might start drinking or engage in other harmful behaviors. Stress can weaken their immune systems.

"Christakis said doctors should be mindful of these risks to a patient's spouse. And the findings might play into how health care decisions are made.... "

Boots on the ground

2006-02-12T17:55:00.000-08:00

I fly my hawk often on sections of fallow pasture within a working cattle ranch near home. It is a large property by the standards of ever-shrinking fields around Baton Rouge. Having access to it seems like a daily repeating miracle.

Passing the ranch foreman after a recent hunt, I asked if he would mind my riding along someday as he moved the cattle or the hay between his fields. I think he heard me asking for a tour, and he obliged me, saying, "Well, sure. Call before you come out and we'll take the big tractor. I'll show you some of the parts you haven't seen." I thanked him and am looking forward to this, but a tour is not what I meant to ask for.

I've been the recipient of his and the landowner's hospitality here for six or seven years. I've spent untold hours and made many fine memories in one or another section of this big pasture beneath the levee. Sitting down in the center of it, my head below the waving tops of johnsongrass and my hawk feeding beside me, I have felt again the true size of the world. I have begun to feel at home there, a dangerous error for any guest.

What I meant to ask the foreman was, Can I do anything to help? I've been taking from this place too long and giving nothing back. I would like to earn a little of the ownership I feel for it. I could mend a fence or set a post or truck a load of grain someplace if that would help and he would let me.

But a tour may be a good place to start. There are parts I haven't seen, and the parts I know I'd know better if I learned how they are used when I'm not there.

This passage from The Memory of Old Jack (see previous post for link) speaks to how these fields seems to me over the course of a season:

"His mind was formed long before the days when maps were commonplace, and even longer before the time of aerial views and photographs. His memory of the place was never overlooking and abstract, but ground-level, as immediate always to his hand as to his eye. It was unified in his mind not by the geographical relationships of its various boundaries and landmarks but by his old routes over it, its aspects opening ahead of him as he ascended heights of the ground or emerged from trees, moving over it in his memory, on horseback or behind a team or on foot."

Quote break

2006-02-10T17:30:00.000-08:00

From The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry's 1974 novel---a sort of literary monograph, written as others of his books in illumination of one life in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky.

The time is roughly mid-20th century, in the last years for Old Jack Beechum, a man born early enough to have lost his brothers to the Civil War. He lives now in a dwindling present he can hardly recognize, but also in his prime, which he sees with unaccountable clarity. Old Jack toggles back and forth, always wholly in one place or the other, but mostly in the past.

In this passage, Old Jack remembers too well the truth of a marriage that could not bear happiness and would end, though years later, without ever really beginning:

"He won her with his vices, she accepted him as a sort of 'mission field,' and it was the great disaster of both their lives. He bound her to him by disavowing the very energy that bound him to her. She was bound to him by a vision of him that she held above him---that he, in fact, neither understood nor aspired to; and he was bound to her by a vision of her that she would discover, by her own lights, to be beneath her. Her ambition would be forever as strange and estranging to him as the great heat and strength of his desire would be to her. It is a cruel thing for him now, looking back, to see the two of them working out the terms of their agony."

Keeping score

2006-02-10T07:29:00.000-08:00

For what it's worth, I am a fan of the sighthounds (see here for mention of the one my wife and I had for 14 years) and I love to watch them hunt. They are not practical hunting dogs in this area (our bunnies are called Swamp Rabbits for a reason) but if I lived in the high plains (dry, flat, open country), I would probably be hunting cottontails and jacks with some kind of sighthound.

That said, I admit I don't like very much the idea of applying a point system to a hunt, a feature of Open Field Coursing. There is nothing of this sort in falconry, no formal competition, although I do of course record every kill . . . I guess that would be "one point each," for those keeping score at home.

The competition between predator and prey is not something that needs a point system to understand or appreciate. It is a hunt, the object of which is to catch, kill and eat the quarry, which for its sake seeks to avoid this long as possible. It happens every day, all the time, no matter who is watching or keeping score. I happen to think it's beautiful and exciting, and these aspects are key to my enjoyment of falconry; but I know none of the animals in this drama are worried about earning points.

Evaluating the dogs (or hawks for that matter) with a point system is another thing altogether. Mutually agreed-upon standards have always been a part of breed improvement and necessary for that. Show dogs have their standards, too, and points, and plenty of nasty competition to boot! But when an artificial point system is stretched to cover a hunt---a wild thing with its own standards entirely---it is stretched too thin in my opinion.

Beyond that opinion, I have strong feelings against inviting television news crews along on a hunt---on any hunt. This is not a reaction of shame for my chosen activity, just an acknowledgement that hunting is not for everyone. Views of death are not for everyone; although let me be the first one to break this news to some of you: All of us are going to die, so we'll view at least one in our lifetimes.

Fellow falconers, carry on. Love your sport and your birds; love the quarry and country. Share it with your friends. Teach it to your kids. Write about it. Just choose carefully when the local news crew asks to film this thing you do.

Photo by Jonathan Millican

A good depression

2006-02-09T08:31:00.000-08:00

One of our daughters has a fixation on one of our cats. She loves the cat, but more than that, the animal is her favorite point of reference. She can describe a tree or a house or what she did in school today using only versions of the cat's name plus a few adjectives and conjunctions: "Oh, it was so Tinyish! We had a little bit of Tiny first, and then we sat and petted Tiny's ear." Maybe you can guess the cat's name.

She gets this from me. How many times can I make my favorite Kentucky tobacco farmer a point of reference in my writing? I'm about to add one more.

What we need in this country is a good Depression. The last one gave us a whole generation of really tough bastards who won WWII for us and saved every penny and knew how to hunt and fish and grow their own crops. They loved animals both wild and tame and knew them well, but I'll bet you few would tell you cats had legal rights.

The people dying today of old age grew up minding their own business. They helped themselves and folks they knew. They were self-sufficient, which didn't mean doing everything alone; it meant sharing the work with people who shared your interests. They loved their country and its ideals and distrusted its politicians all at once. My grandfather was such a person, different from Wendell Berry's people because he was raised in the city, but alike in his frugality, industry, patriotism and independence. He fought in WWII and Korea, and though he loved his life dearly, I think he died wishing just a little bit he'd died in battle.

Like I say of the wife he recently widowed, we are not making more like him.

I know already that I'm too late to pick up the mantle Granddad left behind. I'm too soft, too uncertain about even the things that matter most to me. I hope to never die in battle. But I sure see the value of independence, both the grand ideal and the day-to-day practice of it. I can't help but see the lack of this quality in the bad behavior of hunters and the worse behavior of anti-hunters. A little more of it in each of us and we might just get along.

Coursing under the gun

2006-02-08T09:26:00.000-08:00

In defense of all good things old-fashioned and odd, I present this recent story by ABC News: a pitifully slanted piece of writing that "exposes" open field coursing (rabbit hunting with sighthounds) in California and (tiresomely, predictably, maddeningly) its presumed "cruelty" to animals.

At least one state legislator, having seen video of rabbits killed by dogs, now seeks to ban the sport. The anti-hunting and animal rights groups, for their part, are calling for direct action---harassment and worse---against individual hunt participants. They've distributed the names, home addresses and phone numbers of dozens of coursing enthusiasts over the Internet. Naturally, the California legislator's righteous indignation is featured in the story while the calls for vigilante violence go unmentioned.

Coursing is an old hunting sport, different from falconry in many ways but plenty enough alike that its detractors need see no difference. In both, one animal pursues and catches another while people watch, partisan and unapologetic for the outcome. It is a hunt, after all, the purposeful killing of animals. Ultimately, that's what is so abhorrent to those who now seek to ban coursing and punish those who enjoy it. If you are any kind of hunter---if you ever eat meat---take note of this.

I don't know and fear to imagine the direction this story might take. But it is plausible to ask if America could go the way of Great Britain, utterly tamed by misguided anti-cruelty sentiment. Maybe it's inevitable that the wealthy "First World" can afford a class of people who oppose hunting and even eating animals. In no other place or time could we have the luxury of this conceit. Look around you at the world and tell me if you think this will last.

Waypoints manifestito

2006-02-08T08:46:00.000-08:00

Wendell Berry says it better, but in short: The Modern World is a wealthy, detached, and theoretical place. These attributes set it instantly apart from the older world that is cash-poor and tightly bound by real constraints of time, distance, energy and good will.

The Modern World accepts no constraints; it borrows without ceiling from an infinite future to pay for perpetual growth fueled by bottomless sources of energy. For these reasons, the Modern World has no need for good will.

This is a problem, obviously, for all of us. But the purpose of this blog is not to stop people from being modern; considering the medium, that would be silly. Nor is it to rehash points made more effectively and more beautifully by others.

My purpose is to celebrate (I fear, to eulogize) the other world, that one full of all the wonderful things a friend of mine calls "old-fashioned and odd."

Quote break

2006-02-02T17:16:00.000-08:00

This one comes from Annie Proulx's collection of short stories, Close Range, a Christmas present from Mom. Close Range includes the good story, now very well known, "Brokeback Mountain." (It's a Western!)

The quote I'd like to share comes from a different story, entitled "The Governors of Wyoming." Here the misguided but earnest anti-ranching activist Wade Walls (I don't think "eco-terrorist" is a term he uses, but others would) prepares to spend an evening cutting fences. He aims to release the cows, which he despises and hopes die in the road or at very least cause the rancher some headache with the round up and fence mending. As Wade explains to an accomplice, "It's not so much the logic of the act, it's the action of the act, the point made."

Another accomplice, this one a little fed up with her part in the deal, quizzes Walls over diner:

"Wade," said Renti, "do you work for a real estate developer?"

"For god's sake, no. What gave you that idea?"

"You want to get rid of the cows, right? I mean, isn't that what it comes down to, cows or subdivisions? I mean, what happens to a ranch once the stock is gone? Development, right? What else is there? I mean, what are you trying to do?" Contempt came out of her like water from a firehose.

"I want to bring it back," he said. His voice swelled with professional passion. "I want it to be like it was, all the fences and cows gone."

Proulx lets Wade wax on in a perfectly executed and obviously well-rehearsed polemic, but its music is flat to Renti's ear. After Walls finishes his speech, Renti says:

"Yeah. Why don't you blow up a meatpacker then instead of hammering ranchers? Why don't you wreck Florida ranchers? I bet there's more beef comes out of Florida than the west."

She walked out of the room with a haunchy slouch, not waiting to hear him say that western beef was the pivot point on which it all turned, that the battleground was the ruined land that belonged to the People."

The rights of cats

2006-01-31T18:41:00.000-08:00

Steve Bodio sent this link to a story by Sally Pook from News.Telegraph.co.uk. Our Parlimentary forefathers in England are working to pass legislation that would grant a "bill of rights" to that country's...pets.

"Pets are to be given five "freedoms" under new legislation before Parliament that aims to raise the standards of welfare by fining or jailing owners who neglect their animals.

"The freedoms include appropriate diet, suitable living conditions, companionship or solitude as appropriate, monitoring for abnormal behaviour and protection from pain, suffering, injury and disease."

There will be an 18 page code for the proper keeping of cats, for just one example. "Fining or jailing owners" will help enforce the new moggy bill of rights.

This lead me to ponder how we might consider the same sort of legislative effort here, introduced perhaps by Sen. Rick Santorum (R. Penn)? Let's listen in:

Ms. Busy: Well, thank goodness! Cats everywhere will now enjoy the rights they deserve.

Mr. Stumped: Rights? Cats have rights?

Ms. Busy: Of course they have rights! They have a right to proper care: vaccinations, freedom from abuse, protection from the elements. Also to privacy in the toilet, abundant and delicious food, regular mental stimulation, unconditional love, and quiet solitude when they need it.

Mr. Stumped: (Thinking, Wow, that's more than I had growing up...)

Ms. Busy: And you can't doc their tails.

Mr. Stumped: They don't like that?

Ms. Busy: Of course not! It's inhumane! How would you like your tail removed?

Mr. Stumped: Well, then, what about neutering?

Ms. Busy: Essential. Only registered breeders shall keep cats unless they are spayed or neutered.

Mr. Stumped: But what if the cat wants to have kittens?

Ms. Busy: What?

Mr. Stumped: I mean, cats have wants, right? They want pretty much the same things we want, wouldn't that be your position?

Ms. Busy: Of course!

Mr. Stumped: So why not kittens? You're talking about forcible sterilization. What if my cat really wants to be a mother?

Ms. Busy: I hadn't thought of that. But it's absurd. Not all cats can be mothers.

Mr. Stumped: Why not?

Ms. Busy: It's not best for them. Think of all the unwanted kittens!

Mr. Stumped: Haven't there always been unwanted kittens?

Ms. Busy: Exactly!

Mr. Stumped: Aren't there a lot of unwanted kittens out there now?

Ms. Busy: Tragically, yes.

Mr. Stumped: What should we do about them?

Ms. Busy: We should adopt every one. In fact I have eight, currently, all strays. Those left unclaimed must be put down; the shelter puts them down by the dozen every week. I'm in tears over it constantly. I pray for a day when no more unwanted cats are born.

Mr. Stumped: When the only cats alive are in good homes?

Ms. Busy: Precisely!

Mr. Stumped: What about wild cats? Bobcats, say.

Ms. Busy: That's silly. Wild cats take care of themselves. They're in the wild. Humans can't harm them there.

Mr. Stumped: But they still get hit by cars. We build houses in their habitat. We poison them accidently with antifreeze and on purpose to protect the chickens. Trap them, too. Should all of this stop?

Ms. Busy: Of course! It's disgusting what some people will do, criminal! All of that should be outlawed at once.

Mr. Stumped: Well, OK. But what then about all the other animals? Don't we do all sorts of harm to them all the time? Aren't they dying left and right, even as we speak?

Ms. Busy: Yes, I suppose they are. Will you excuse me?

Mr. Stumped: Where are you going?

Ms. Busy: To write my Congressman. We need to start sterilizing people immediately. There should be fewer people in the world. As few as possible. And cats. There should always be cats!

Old meets new / new eats old

2006-01-29T09:33:00.000-08:00

My email pal Issac (see his blog link to right), is an American practicing falconry in Japan. His posts and emails reveal what is to me a fascinating scenario: a toggling between all that is modern and all that is traditional in the world, traversed a couple times a week on the seat of a little motor scooter. Now flying a Harris hawk (Parabuteo unicinctus), a New World bird and new to centuries-old Japanese falconry, the juxtaposition seem even greater.

Recently Issac's hawk caught its first sparrow along the banks of a drainage ditch, a typical near-urban hawking spot for the small cadre of falconers who live and hunt in his region. Evidently, local skepticism about the potential of the Harris hawk for catching birds runs high. The traditional short-winged hawk of Japanese falconry is the goshawk (Accipiter gentilis), a fast and versatile catcher of ducks, quail, hare and more, and a worldwide favorite. Nonetheless, the Japanese seem able to meld old and new in much of what they do, and now they'll have another opportunity to do so!

Harris hawk eating a sparrow in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan

Update on grandmother

2006-01-29T09:23:00.000-08:00

Thanks to everyone for kind comments about my grandmother and for less-than-kind thoughts with regard to her attackers. Both sentiments appreciated.

For good news, there is plenty: Margaret continues to improve daily. And she learned last week that facial surgery will not be necessary, only a cosmetic option. She says, "Honey, I've BEEN beautiful. I can stand a crooked nose for a few years." They're not making many people like her these days.

Unfortunately, her left eye will still need an operation if it is to regain sight.

For grandmother

2006-01-25T10:25:00.000-08:00

On Saturday afternoon, my 82-year-old grandmother Margaret was surprised and beaten in her garage while attempting to bring in her groceries. Two men followed her home from the shopping mall, a distance of a few miles over quiet residential streets. One man remained in an idling silver sedan while the other attacked, wielding a chunk of broken concrete that officers found later in Grandmother's car. The attack broke five of Margaret's facial bones, including three around her left eye, the bridge of her nose and left cheek. She sustained deep lacerations that bled profusely and remain grotesquely swollen and bruised. She will need surgery to mend the facial fractures and a later procedure to repair her left eye, currently sightless. The attackers drove away with forty dollars in stolen cash, a few credit cards and a checkbook.

Astoundingly, my grandmother did not lose consciousness and was soon able to exit her car. She found her keys on the ground and let herself into the house. She then went back to the car to retrieve two TV diners and put them in the freezer before speed-dialing my cousin through vision too blurred and bloody to dial 911. Several ambulances and police cars arrived minutes later.

Shelly was near tears when she told me the news. I held Briana on my hip at the back door, both of us still smiling from our bike ride. I had a number of quick thoughts and dumb questions, realizing finally that Grandmother was still alive. I put B down on her feet.

"You have to go," said my wife.

I told her what I was thinking: "I have no response to this."

So she repeated, "You have to go."

I drove up on Sunday, about seven hours to my parents' house, and saw Grandmother Monday morning at her home. I rode over with Dad; Mom was already there.

Grandmother lay on the couch and raised her arms to me, smiling beneath a large white bandage and an eye patch. Dark purple smears marred her cheeks and brow and drained into the folds of her neck. It was better than I expected. I knelt to kiss her and hold her hand. She returned a surprisingly strong grip, pulsing with life and relief. She said, "Honey, I am just mad as hell. But then I get so tired," and "They didn't have hit me," and "Can you believe this?" Then she told me there was food in the fridge.

I have no need to ask why someone would do this to my grandmother. She is old and was alone. There are men like jackals everywhere, hungry and waiting. Rural Georgia counties are now ad hoc production centers for something called crystal meth. It's all anyone talks about. It was the first topic of conversation as people gathered at Grandmother's house. One neighbor's husband is a volunteer firefighter; he spends his time dousing exploded trailers in the woods, the work of failed amateur chemists. Another mentioned that 40% of the adult population of the county was on some kind of probation. Is that possible? Could that be true?

I don't want to reduce this post to a polemic, unless it's too late for that. But I am angry and sad and deeply shamed by what happened Saturday. There is blame, plenty to go around, but I need to let some of it fall upon me. One of our sheep was away from the fold. Our family flock was too scattered even to act in its own defense. We did the best we could, but our effort was clearly in response and not in prevention of this predatory act.

A falconer's opinion

2006-01-18T05:11:00.000-08:00

On Falconry Clubs,

the North American Falconers Association

and "New Nafas"

I first joined NAFA in 1986, which was about as soon as I could. Two years before, as a fourteen-year-old in Panama, I wrote a letter to NAFA's Southeastern Director. I asked her for information about the club and mused that "we would become good friends" soon as I got to the States; after all, how many falconers could be up there?

The director kindly sent an application package—then my best evidence that North American falconry existed—and though we have not become close friends, I did eventually meet her in person. More good evidence.

For a sport like ours and the independent types who follow it, a club is a curious thing. On balance, we are poorly suited to group activity. Most of us are happy alone and count solitude a great pleasure of falconry.

And yet few would deny their sport is also sometimes lonely. It's a feeling akin to unrequited love (something we know well enough from our hawks). What we need is a support group, or a twelve-step program: the company of people who understand us. Falconry clubs offer more than this, but they serve this purpose too.

For a young falconer or the new falconer, club membership is a slice of Heaven. Its newsletters are read like Bible verses, saved and studied, parts of them memorized. The Big Names become saints, revered if not consciously worshiped. Pictures of hawks become sacred symbols; what else could a giant white gyrfalcon be?

Eventually the shimmer wears off. The saints reveal themselves as plumbers and teachers and retail salesmen. Their epistles seem more like informed opinions and more like your own. Finally, though never quite completely, the birds become animals in real flesh and blood.

It's then that the mundane purposes of falconry clubs—of any club—are obvious. A few people need to keep the records and the money. Someone has to lead the group discussions. Someone picks the meeting place but needs a quorum or else all Hell breaks loose. There has to be a newsletter. And so it goes.

For a hawking club we all have NAFA...This is not the best of possible worlds. Remember what a sketch we are as individuals. None of us could represent the rest or should want to! Yet here we are just the same and calling ourselves a club.

The big surprise is that it works. From the outside we seem unified, one voice for falconry in North America. The agencies that regulate our activity probably appreciate that and pretend it's true, even if they know better. When up against a generalizing abstraction like government, it sometimes helps to become one yourself. Thus have we made some of the gains we claim: official recognition, extended seasons, limited privileges to possession and a few private property rights. In sum, the current state of American falconry.

Could things be better? For us, certainly. But could NAFA be better? I wonder.

I've been a member maybe long enough to see some of the best and worst we can be. One of the smartest people I've ever known has been NAFA President; and one of the best falconers anywhere was a recent Vice President. I've also seen, perpetrated under the guise of club policy, some of the worst decisions regarding falconry I can cite.

Neither of these extremes are representative. NAFA is a broad-based organization that seems to me inclusive of most American falconers. Certainly it rejects few. NAFA's stated goals may be high (and should be) but its membership, efforts, effects and products are best represented by a bell curve. Some would call that a sign of mediocrity; to me, it's the best proof of NAFA's inclusiveness. It takes a good sample to make a bell curve.

A number of falconers would like to challenge NAFA's position as our representative body. This is not new, even to my short experience. There was always some talk of starting another club. On the state level this even happens from time to time. A split comes rarely on good terms. Then two clubs exist in one state, some of the members being members of both. Strange but true.

Maybe this is necessary. But it is expensive of energy and good will, resources modern falconers ought to conserve. So I'm going to stick with NAFA, better and worse. That won't stop me from speaking up or making an ass of myself entirely on solo effort. Individuals have that luxury; as a club we can only stand together and lean in the right direction.

Comments

2006-01-15T09:56:00.000-08:00

Hello Few Readers:

I got a note this morning from Roseann Hanson of 3-Martini Lunch fame that my blog template is incomprehensible to her Mac. So I've changed it; maybe her machine will be able to view this one.

In the process I found posts from Rebecca, Prairie Mary, Larissa and others that I haven't been able to view (and didn't know I had). My apologies to y'all. Comments feature should work now. Many thanks for your thoughts, always welcome.

PS, to "Time Runs Backwards:" I am a licensed falconer.

"Nanofiction" a la prairie mary

2006-01-14T05:15:00.000-08:00

Querencia, now a going concern with Steve Bodio and Reid Farmer as frequent contributors (myself less frequent), enjoys the good comments of smart readers and writers like Mary Scriver, a.k.a. Prairie Mary.

Reid pointed out a feature of Mary's blog she calls "nanofictions," which are tightly-packed little sketches in prose and a lot of fun to read. Here's one, and here's another.

Yesterday I jotted down a little scene from our domestic life, thinking it a good start for a longer piece. But encouraged by Mary's example, I'll post it as-is and keep working on the rest offline:

Maggie walked without pause through dark parts of the house, fleeing a bad dream. She found our open bedroom door and stood just inside it on the rug at the same spot our old dog used to pee. Shelly and I sat up almost simultaneously, in response or maybe anticipation of some small word from our daughter.
Outside and visible from three corners of the room, a lightning storm pushed trees around in the neighbor's yard. Maggie climbed up the foot of the bed and twisted herself into a knot around my neck.

Real time

2006-01-11T05:49:00.000-08:00

My good friend Eric and I have never lived in the same town. The closest we came was around the time we met---early 90s---when Eric lived in Waycross, GA, and I lived an hour east in Valdosta. In later years we kept in contact from even greater distances: at one point Eric worked in Australia and at another in South Africa. I've stuck to the States, moving from Georgia to Florida to Louisiana.

Eric and I have much in common, not the least of which is our falconry, and a strong friendship that makes distance an inconsequential factor in staying "close."

Friendships like ours have many precedents. People have always traveled away from home, for work or war, written letters back and received them, and returned to pick up relationships more or less where they left off. Records of correspondence between distant colleagues are a study in themselves; the pace of shared news and insight giving each time to consider his reply and sometimes contributing to products of intellect---ideas, plans, manuscripts---impossible to create another way.

Such correspondence, as I've known it, manages to add substance to separated lives but in a way that also keeps them separate. Correspondents circle in their own orbits until shared experience reunites them.

For me and Eric that shared experience comes usually at Thanksgiving, during a week of falconry with friends in the Texas panhandle. There we share every meal, flush for each others' birds, see miles of the same flat, windy country and go home (as far as we can tell) with the same memories. For the remainder of the hawking season we trade emails and digital photos, a couple a week or more. These short bulletins have a familiar shape and share a distinction from lived experience that comes simply from being written after the facts. We send each other what we want him to see, which is fine, but not the same as seeing it ourselves.

This morning I had the strange experience of joining Eric in the field from four states away. He emailed with his new cell phone these dim, early morning images of a hunt. This sequence shows his merlin standing on a freshly-killed bird, then carrying it to a fence post where the falcon plucked and ate it. I received the photos at a pace I know matched the natural course of these events. Likewise Eric's typed commentary matched things we would think and say had we been been within an earshot.

What about this seems to cross a threshold? My experience of Eric's morning hunt (a part of it, anyway) seems more real than a later retelling yet less than shared experience: A weird middle ground made more strange, and strangely more accurate, by the blurring of details.

Ok, another quote break

2005-12-28T18:51:00.000-08:00

In addition to other virtues, Berry stays on task. Even a barber (Jayber Crow) knows and regrets the great turning-over of power from that produced by animals and wisdom to that produced by machines and fossil fuel. But much to Crow's (and Berry's) credit, he feels implicated.

This passage rings true to a new bike commuter who remains a driver of cars, if a little less frequently. Here Jayber realizes that his first purchase of an automobile (to reach the bars and barmaids of Hargrave) is somehow allied to a post-war farmer's first purchase of a tractor.

"My wonderful machine sometimes altered my mind so that I, lately a pedestrian myself, fiercely resented all such impediments on the road. Even at my sedate top speed of forty miles per hour, I hated anything that required me to slow down. My mind raged and fumed and I cursed aloud at farmers driving their stock across the road, at indecisive possums, at children on bicycles. Ease of going was translated without pause into a principled unwillingness to stop."

Quote break

2005-12-23T04:42:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow, the story of (fictional) Port William, Kentucky's town barber. Most of the characters I know from Berry's world are farmers, like himself, and those who aren't sometimes get less than three-dimentional portraits. Not so Jayber Crow, who uses his various perspectives as orphan, state ward, laborer, wanderer, and barber to paint a picture of home that would have been difficult to do from the "inside."

But I'm only half way through, so what do I know?

I did find this wonderful passage a few chapters ago. With my mind, like everyone's here, coming back almost daily to thoughts of flood, here's Jayber's observation of same:

"I was thoroughly tired, and I didn't exactly lie awake, but I didn't exactly sleep, either. As soon as I shut my eyes I could see the river again, only now I seemed to see it up and down its whole length. Where just a little while before people had been breathing and eating and going about in their old everyday lives, now I could see the currents come riding in, at first picking up straws and dead leaves and little sticks, and then boards and pieces of firewood and whole logs, and then maybe the henhouse or the barn or the house itself. As if the mountains had melted and were flowing into the sea, the water rose and filled all the airy spaces of rooms and stalls and fields and woods, carrying away everything that would float, casting up the people and scattering them, scattering or drowning their animals and poultry flocks. The whole world, it seemed, was cast adrift, riding the currents, whirled about in eddies, the old life submerged and gone, the new one not yet come."

A visit to new orleans

2005-12-12T06:41:00.000-08:00

A quick post to Steve's blog here.

Not so simple fare

2005-12-03T19:33:00.000-08:00

You'd think I was the first man to eat a rabbit, the way I go on about it. But that's what I do: I get into something--usually something sensible but rather obvious and unremarkable--and I wear it out. You never hear the end of it.

I don't mean I master it. In fact, I'm a dabbler in almost all of my pet interests, and that makes my enthusiasm for them a little bit sad. Tom Coulson, who encouraged me to grow my first tomato, grows a heap of them every summer: Big, bright red globes, spread out along the window sills and piled up on the chest freezers. He gives them away in bags, lest they go bad. I barely make enough to grace a salad.

So it is with the rabbits. I don't even hunt rabbits very often, taking fewer than 20 in a normal season and most of these while hunting something else. Half my annual harvest comes typically from one week in North Texas, where rabbits are simply the commonest thing to flush. In other words, I'm as much of a rabbit hunter as a tomato farmer.

But I explain myself in this way: My enthusiasms stem first from recognizing something good; a single example is enough. They come second from appreciating the work that always--necessarily--precedes the production of a good thing. I am naturally lazy, so here again, a single example is usually enough.

All of this I submit as proof to you of the goodness embodied by a meal of cottontail rabbit: hunted, killed, cleaned, cooked, eaten and enjoyed. Tonight was rabbit night, one of a couple we hold each winter when my wife is gone and the kids and I can get away with eating at the counter.

So now some snapshots for you, and Shelly's Breaded Rabbit recipe:

"...There is nothing special about this recipe except that I've sworn myself never to eat it. By cooking this with and for my girls, I hope to teach them to appreciate and enjoy the art and science of hunting, falconry, and, of course, cooking. I know that it probably tastes like chicken. This seems to be the standard claim made by those wanting you to eat any variety of wild animal. I know this firsthand from joining Matt at a dinner function that served alligator, bear, and lab rat.

I was raised in a city of tall buildings and in those days could not identify a Peregrine from a pigeon. The thought of eating a bunny rabbit would have made me cry. Over the years with Matt (about fifteen and counting), I have learned many things regarding the sport of falconry. I can differentiate between the species of hawks or falcons that call the Florida Turnpike, I-10, and the back roads of Baton Rouge home. I also understand that some of these same hawks and falcons need to eat rabbits, birds, etc., to stay alive. And like the hawk needing to catch its food to survive, Matt also has this need to provide food for the family table. So, every so often I have him provide us our rations. I know that it warms Matt's heart to see his wife cooking up Charlie's catch for the day. Truth is, there is little more I can do to let Matt know that I accept his passion for hunting.

On rabbit night, you will find me enjoying a side salad..."

-Shelly Mullenix

Ingredients:

1 Rabbit (gutted, skinned, and cut into pieces...breast, legs, or whatever they are called.)
2 cups Italian style bread crumbs
½ tbsp Italian seasoning
½ tsp ground black pepper
½ tsp garlic powder
1-2 cups skim milk
1-2 cups egg substitute (any brand)
4-5 tbsp olive oil
1 lemon (quartered); optional

Serving Size: the Hunter and his two small children

In a plastic bag, soak rabbit overnight in milk. Heat nonstick skillet on no higher than medium with 3-4 Tbsp of oil. Combine bread crumbs with all seasonings and place in a bowl. Take rabbit from milk marinade and dip into egg substitute. Next, dip in bread crumbs. Once all rabbit has been battered, transfer to hot skillet. Turn rabbit pieces over every 3-4 minutes, using remaining oil as needed. It varies, but total cooking time is about 12-15 minutes. Place on paper towel to remove excess oil. Squeeze lemon over rabbit pieces if you choose. Serve immediately.

Serving suggestion: Serve with sweet potato (450 degrees for about 1½-2 hours), steamed string beans, and at least one beer!

Louisiana proud

2005-12-02T07:21:00.000-08:00

There are some things Government does right, if sometimes in spite of itself. One of these is hiring the occasional superstar. I offer here two prime examples: My neighbors SFC Tyler Williamson (left), currently serving in Iraq, and his wife Ann, who happens to be our Louisiana Secretary of Social Services (busy lately, with hundreds of thousands newly in need of her department's help) . Now there's a pair for you.

Criticizing government policy and personnel is a blogger's bread and butter. I eat some myself, though I don't consider Waypoints much of a political forum. In fact, I'm thoroughly a product of government policy--literally born and raised within the US Department of Defense, educated in state schools and employed 11 years now by tax-funded agencies.

When I think of good things in government, I think of several public servants I am privileged to know and call friends. Take care and God please bless you.

Animals as machine fuel

2005-11-30T09:15:00.000-08:00

In what Wendell Berry might agree is the inevitable reduction of farm animals to the service of machines and profit, university researchers are now making biodiesel (engine fuel) from chicken fat:

"We're trying to expand the petroleum base," said Brian Mattingly, a graduate student in chemical engineering.

Raw oil for this experiment comes from Tyson Foods, perhaps looking to state university assistance in its R&D...another worrisome Berry cranking point.

Maybe we can solve the energy crisis for good by donating the bodies of our recent dead to a similar cause? I think they made a movie about that.

Correction...

2005-11-14T16:23:00.000-08:00

To my post detailing Dad's search for Shell gas: Dad says, "I still look for that Shell station when I am on the road but will not go ten miles out of the way just to find one. . .When gas was $ 3.00 per, I was saving fifteen cents, but I can fill up now for two dollars, thus saving ten cents per gallon."

Saving falcons and falconers

2005-11-11T05:53:00.000-08:00

In my pre-and-early teenage years, I had no notion of the Middle East as hotbed of terrorism and hatred, although the Iran hostage crisis was an obvious outlier to that conception. I had something like a National Geographic image of the region, full of rolling dunes, camels, Bedouin nomads, ancient sand-colored cities, coursing and falconry.

Much of that romance remains in my head, though augmented now with newer images of tracer rounds, burned cars, bodies, weary and wary network reporters, and Osama Bin Laden. I guess it was inevitable that as an entire region becomes an enemy to us, everything native to it must become suspect: its names, languages, places, religion. Now someone has roped falconry into the list of suspicious Middle Eastern practices.

A recent post by Steve Bodio swats at this particular notion and at the faulty evidence behind it.

Elsewhere in the world, Bulgarian falconry is under attack fromits own government. Friends of the sport are asked to respond with letters. These suggested addresses from yesterday's NAFA communication:

Copy to: Bulgarian Association for Conservation of Birds of Prey â€“The Falconers Association- Member of IAF. President Pavel Yakimov

Letters should be sent to :

1. Minister Nihat Kabil
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
Sofia 1040
55 â€Hristo Botevâ€ blvd
BULGARIA

2. Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
Information and Public Relations Directorate
Director : Margarita Kojuharova
Sofia 1040
55 â€Hristo Botevâ€ blvd
BULGARIA

3. Minister Jevdet Chakurov
Ministry of Environment and Water
Sofia 1000
67, â€œWilliam Gladstoneâ€ str
BULGARIA
4. Commission of Agriculture and Forestry in Parliament of Republic of Bulgaria
For : Vasil Todrov Kalinov, Chairman
Sofia 1169
1 â€œAlexander Batenbergâ€ sq
BULGARIA
5. Commission of Environment and Water in Parliament of Republic of Bulgaria
For : Georgi Todorov Bojinov, Chairman
Sofia 1169
1 â€œAlexander Batenbergâ€ sq
BULGARIA

Copy of your letter should be e-mailed to :

1. The Bulgarian Association for Conservation of Birds of Prey â€“ The Falconersâ€™ Association, President Pavel Yakimov
cherrug@abv.bg ,
cherrug@gmail.com

2. christian.decoune@belgacom.net

On cheap gas

2005-11-10T05:10:00.000-08:00

My father buys Shell gas. He carries a discount card with that company and pays, I believe he told me, nearly thirty cents less per gallon than without it. So he hunts for Shell stations, noting locations in his town and mine, and he drives on empty past higher-priced gasoline in search of the big yellow mollusk.

This is Dad's way of saving money on gas, and it's not a bad one. Thirty cents on the gallon adds up, particularly on a seven-hour trip to Baton Rouge. Others check the Internet for daily deals. And more Americans (tho by no means all) are looking to smaller cars and hybrids, or they're driving less---I hear that, at least, but it's hard to verify given the traffic.

We've all been paying more than $2.50 per gallon since September, sometimes a lot more. With the oil companies still explaining away their profits (probably to shareholders) on Capitol Hill, I bet a lot of people are talking about this today.

From my "see more" link in the post below, Jonathan Hanson wrote a good, angry piece on this. A comment from David Zincavage suggests that Hanson just wants cheaper gas, and since I know he uses gas, that may be true. Zincavage:

"Gas has been up to the $3 a gallon range here in California recently. Big deal. When I was young it was $.30 a gallon, and believe me a dollar then was worth more than $10 today in purchasing power. They pay more than we do during market peaks every single day in Canada & in Europe. If you want cheaper gas, support letting them drill in more places and build more refineries."

But are more drilling and more refining really the answer? There's another way to get cheap gas, and it's one I know for certain Hanson employs: Use less.

The price of any gallon of gasoline is immaterial; what matters is how much of it you buy, the percentage of your income spent on it. Reduce your demand for gas and presto--gas prices drop through the floor, at least in your household.

The benefits need not extend beyond the household budget, but they do. Chances are, the choices you've made to trim your personal appetite for gasoline will also trim your waistline and consequently extend your life. I'm by no means an evangelist on that point, nor particularly trim, but I recognize the potential there. I bike about 50 miles a week between my office and home and do feel better.

You'll also be doing more to clean, well, my air at least. I live along Louisiana's "petrochemical corridor," which could be claimed also by the nation, as we produce a third of the oil you use every day. The byproducts of that production waft over my house and yard and lead to "air quality warnings" on most summer days. Consuming less gas has got to mean producing less of it at some point. I have to believe that.

Ultimately, independence from any product you are forced to buy offers a kind of freedom, if only the freedom to buy something else. Like batteries.

Signing on

2005-11-09T07:55:00.000-08:00

A month to gather my thoughts netted not much of a harvest. But at least the noise--all the chatter in the back of my head that caused last month's brownout--is faded, and I can again identify a thought when I have one.

And I have one: The oil companies are laughing at us as we hand them record-breaking profits. We are making them rich; our sloth and weak thighs and wide waists are making them strong. We are driving ourselves to the poorhouse and the hospital.

But rest easy, "the profits are in line with other industries when profits are compared to the industry's enormous revenues."

(see also...)

Signing off

2005-10-09T04:43:00.000-07:00

I'll be shutting down this blog for a while. Many thanks to those who've linked to it and read it. I'll post again at Steve's and keep updating my falconry site, but Waypoints seems to have lost its way. The concept owed much to my reading of good prose and as much to time for reflecting on it. Recent events delivered a sort of one-two punch: My reading is on the ropes lately and my time for reflection already down for the count... Three cliches in one sentence. Man, I still got it!

The topical wrap up---

(a) Charlie (Harris hawk) is no longer plucking his feathers, or at least is taking a break. We are a month into the hunting season and doing OK.

(b) I'm still biking to work, but now in heavy traffic and alongside a tent city under construction in a former hawking field.

(c) New Orleans is coming back online. I swear it is.

Laissez les bontemps ruler!

Do you know what it means, to miss.......

2005-10-05T05:32:00.000-07:00

Some more blogging and discussion on the state and fate of New Orleans here.

Strange do'ins in the mews

2005-10-01T05:31:00.000-07:00

As my boss put it, "This was the longest September anyone can remember." A little rhyming couplet for current events.

Her comment referred to the obvious, the region-wide emergency of storms Katrina and Rita and their aftermath. But let me take it down a notch and talk about myself; or rather my old hawk, Charlie, who would have had a good month---despite the uncertainties, missed hunts and the general chaos of supremely bad weather---had something in his head not tripped and told him, "Pluck your feathers, kid."

Starting about four days ago, Charlie began pulling out the big white feathers beneath his tail, the small red ones on his legs and the little black ones between them. He pulls about a dozen a day, on the perch and in the box at night. If they didn't come out in little clumps, I might be tempted to believe he was starting a late body molt, but no. After nearly eight years of worry-free operation, something's up with Charlie.

My last Harris, the large, fast and ever-hungry Pico de Gallo, started plucking his feathers in a big way three days after the birth of my twins. That was late December, 2000, mid-way through Pico's first season. I spent that week in a panic, watching the best hawk I'd ever flown seem to self-destruct. He littered the grass around his perch with large clumps of body feathers, pulling them without shame even as I watched. I flew him daily, which wasn't easy with infant twins at home, in hopes of righting his sinking ship. He flew well, caught game as always, but in two weeks' time he was naked of every body feather he could reach.

This is an uncommon but as far as I can tell, a widespread tick in the complicated personality of the Harris hawk as a trained bird. Most falconers who've flown several of them had one that plucked. There is a rag-tag body of literature and anecdotal evidence on the condition, all of it equivocal as to a probable cause: stress, boredom, weight (too high or too low), mites, hormones, genetics and younameit. No one knows a cure, or even if this constitutes a disease. But it is distressing, all agree.

I gave Pico back to his breeders before the end of his first season. I couldn't fly two hawks at any rate and chose the one I felt could tolerate my new schedule as a parent. That was Charlie, the slightly less talented but saner of the two. What to do now is my question, and I'm open to suggestion...another rhyming couplet for current events.

Riding the wave

2005-09-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

(From a story by AP's MARY FOSTER in today's Advocate...)
"This is my home. I will never leave New Orleans," said Virginia Darmstadter, 75, who has lived in the Uptown section's Garden District for 21 years and left her husband in a Houston nursing home to check their home. The house had no electricity, and had water and mold. The family planned to return to Houston after cleaning up a few things.
"As soon as we get electricity and my husband is strong enough to come back, believe me, I'll be back," Darmstadter said. "I've lived long enough to know that life is a wave; you move up and down. When you are down, you have to muster the wherewithal to face it."

Second verse

2005-09-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Rita is passing beneath us, grazing the softened underbelly of our state. Water is once again flowing into New Orleans neighborhoods, the Lower Ninth Ward and probably Arabi---storm surge from a cyclone hundreds of miles away and of no direct threat. I just told this to Tom, who lived in Arabi until last month (he's been out of contact with the news today), and his reply was, "WHAT?"

We are feeling spooked and vulnerable these days, or as one correspondent accurately put it, "frail."

Now in Baton Rouge there are rain bands and gusts of wind. More of the same is expected, but at this point in the day, nothing worse. Yet regular gas is gone from the pumps. I used premium to fill my truck this morning, spending almost 30 dollars for half a tank. LSU is shutting down early. The traffic is mounting. I chose to drive in today, leaving the bike at home and ending a long streak of daily rides. I should, but I don't regret it... We are stung!

In a recent interview with Deborah Solomon, our adoptive native poet Andrei Codrescu made a startling reply to the question, "Do you think New Orleans will ever be rebuilt?"

"No. New Orleans had a great period, and now it is going to sink into some kind of glorious mess, like Venice, and become just a tourist spot. People will come to gamble in the casinos and feel the grandeur of what was once there, which the tourist bureau will do its best to recreate...

"I am sure the city will be re-engineered, but I am afraid that in the process it will lose its soul---the people who sing the blues will be gone. A lot of writers and artists won't return to New Orleans. They have no houses. They will go all over the country, back to where they came from."

Lending something of credence to Codrescu's defeatism is the news that Irene Sage---Queen Irene of the Maple Leaf, of Checkpoint Charlie's, of Kerry's Irish Pub, of the French Quarter Fest and of Jazz Fest and of great, great parties in her beautiful two-story house by the levee---She and her husband Scott are moving to Denver.

Wages of sin?

2005-09-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

According to a recent poll of about one-thousand people (their nationality unknown, but the polling firm is described as "international"), 54 percent believe that parts of New Orleans should be abandoned and relocated "on higher ground."

This sentiment seems distilled by an editorial in circulation presumably from this blog by Jim Geraghty. He writes (from Turkey):

"On one side [of New Orleans] you have a giant lake; on the other side you have the Gulf of Mexico. Running through the middle is the Mississippi River. All of which are above you. Preventing those giant bodies of water from flooding and drowning you are levees. These levees are described as 'century-old.' People have been warning about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a hurricane for decades. I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the federal government may not have allocated enough money to speed up the upgrades to those levees. This does, however, raise the question of why city and state residents were waiting around for the federal government to send enough money to upgrade this, instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was only your homes, businesses, and lives at stake.....
To save you guys now, I----and a lot of other Americans----will pitch in. We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian and military rescue and relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're going to want the rest of us to pay for the rebuilding of your city. (In the near future, we're going to have to have a little chat about the wisdom of building below sea level, directly next to large bodies of water.) And if you're going to come to the rest of us hat in hand, demanding the rest of us clean up after your poor judgment, I'd appreciate a little less 'you failed us' and a little more 'we've learned our lesson.' "

Although snarking at our local situation from Ankara, Turkey, might be called cowardly, and did according to Mr. Geraghty result in his first death threat, there are some obvious truths in his comments. New Orleans is largely below sea (and river and lake) level, and has long awaited such a calamity as it just suffered. Asking American taxpayers, especially those who chose not to live in New Orleans, to pay for its reconstruction is bound to be unpopular.

But so long as we're going to point out the folly of building a city on a marsh, let's remember that Manhattan was built on marshland, also, and isn't even now much above the rising Atlantic. San Francisco sits on the trembling cusp of two tectonic plates. Seattle and Tacoma wait beneath the inevitable fallout of several active volcanoes. And there are a lot of tornadoes in "Tornado Alley."

Where shall we build that is safe from natural disaster, or the disasters of nature and mankind combined? If I am paying to rebuild the Florida vacation home of a New England snowbird, shouldn't I expect him to chip in for some levee construction in New Orleans? After all, the city of New Orleans invites him to drink and be merry several times a year, but I bet he has never returned the hospitality.

In a word, refugee

2005-09-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

The latest palliative non-issue in Katrina's wake is whether or not the people whose lives she most thoroughly disrupted should be called "refugees." I'll weigh in here, as one in the wonderful position of having some refuge to offer two dear friends in desperate need of it.

A refugee is one who seeks refuge, that's all. The word contains no bias, suggests no country or race or class of people, except what we bring to it. Those who believe it does (there are many lately, but let's say Representative Diane Watson, quoted in this story by LA Times writers Tina Daunt and Robin Abcarian), may ironically be revealing their own prejudices with the claim!

"These are American citizens, plus they are the sons and daughters of slaves," said Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles). "Calling them refugees coming from a foreign country does not apply to their status. This shows disdain for them. I'm almost calling this a hate crime."

A hate crime? Surely the victims of hate crimes are abused by this statement. And who is claiming these refugees come from "a foreign country?" New Orleans is a unique, multi-cultural and many-racial city in a state some liken to the Third World, but it is in fact an American city. Can we at least agree on that?

I am puzzled by this issue, but I am a white man with a home to come home to. Perhaps I am unqualified to take offense. But I am qualified to say this much: Americans of many races, countries of origin and native tongues last week lost their homes, cars, jobs, pets, families, friends, and once-more-certain futures to a huge storm. These were (and are) people in need of refuge. To deny them the proper word is to deny them their basic need:

1) Not all "hurricane victims" need help; many are dead.

2) Not all "evacuees" were evacuated (many left under their own power before the storm); and this term says nothing of the actual plight they now face as homeless people.

3) Not all were "displaced." As of last night, an estimated 10,000 remained in the city of New Orleans. I would argue for their need of refuge, but they didn't actually go anywhere.

Ultimately, people have a right to call themselves whatever they want. We others are bound by courtesy to accommodate their wishes. But a person in need of refuge---a roof, dry clothes, a good bed, a hot meal, some money---from conditions of total deprivation shouldn't be given anything less, not even a lesser term to describe them.

The new nativism

2005-09-07T08:53:00.000-07:00

A woman in my office noted this morning that New Orleans immigrants are easy to spot, "The clothes are different. The hair is different. The makeup is different." In my knee-jerk liberal fashion, I suggested there were probably many who didn't stick out so much; but basically, I agreed. I had just complained to her about "the New Orleans people" lined bumper-to-bumper along Nicholson Avenue last night and them driving too fast on the River Road. Parish designations don't appear on Louisiana license plates: But I knew.

So we usher in The New Nativism.

Where are you from? Right here. I'm from Baton Rouge.

It will be a point of pride, a rallying cry and a mantra. It is already.

We in Baton Rouge have long made flattering distinctions between "our kind" and theirs. Like it or not, this isn't racist. Without invoking the veiled references to skin color and social class behind the issues of crime, housing and education, anyone can see basic differences between the cities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans. In a sketch, Baton Rouge is a large Small Town, and New Orleans is a small Big City.

There are country folk in New Orleans and surrounding area, don't misunderstand me. Some are my good friends. But there are also many truly urban and cosmopolitan people in the Crescent City, people who would feel more at home in N.Y.C. or Chicago or L.A. than among their nearest neighbors to the northwest. That cities and towns produce different and recognizable material culture is hardly controversial. In fact, it probably is possible to spot a New Orleans native in town these days, though I'm still embarrassed to say it.

Kirk Johnson of the New York Times provides a glaring example of Katrina-related culture clash in this story of 150 evacuees (Are they refugees? more on that later) from New Orleans who find themselves in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas (thanks for the link to Reid Farmer, a Californian with some history and an interest in our region). One particularly suggestive snippet:

"All these trees," Ms. Taylor sobbed, as her husband, Ray, and her two sisters reached out to comfort her. "It seems like hell."

What happens to a small town (even a big one, like ours) when it welcomes a population of urban people so large it doubles or triples its size? A scanning of today's Advocate hints at some of the fallout: Baker (a community just to our north) hires new teachers. Zachary (also north, but closer) plans expansion of roads, seeks Federal dollars. St. Gabriel (to our southeast, toward New Orleans) converts an unused central warehousing facility into a massive morgue. Denham Springs (due east) resinds an ordinance against temporary housing and begs its failing Winn-Dixie to stay open.

Thomas S. Mulligan and Richard Fausset from the LA Times provide a fair overview of the situation in this piece, also sent by Reid.

New Orleans in exile 1.0

2005-09-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

Since moving to Baton Rouge in 1997, I've lived a neatly bifurcated life. On one side, my new home, family and job in the capital city and on the other, my old friends, our falconry and nightlife in New Orleans. Between each world lay eighty miles of wetland and an understanding that the two shall rarely meet.

New Orleans falconers Tom and Jennifer, musicians Scott and Irene, local friends Fred and Sherry, Christie, Donada and Rene, Bret and Inga; and the French Quarter regulars, too many to name even if I knew them. The places: Frenchmen Street, Esplanade, the Fair Grounds, The Pizza Kitchen; and New Orleans East, Chef Menteur Highway, Michoud Boulevard, the 510 bridge, the coffee plant, the Dong Fong; and "da Parish, dawlin!"----Paris Road, the cypress field, Chalmette, Arabi, Steve's neighborhood deli.

I've known that world---St. Bernard Parish and key points west---since age sixteen, learning how to love it on twice-yearly road trips from Georgia. It is a world I still see mostly on weekends and holidays, which gives an uneven but not unpleasant impression. If you add up the days, starting with my first, you'll see why I visit New Orleans in the mind of an aging twenty-one year old. There are worse illusions.

Then came a week of slow motion catastrophe. High winds and breached levees ended mine and a million other illusions of a place that some will tell you (now) should never have existed. There is not much disagreement that large parts of the city were doomed. It was a matter of when, not whether.

Afterwards, this is what it's like for me: My two worlds are weirdly merged. Tom and Jenn, spared drowning in their beds by very little, or by God, are living in my house. Their friends and family and mine all call my number to make contact. My wife speaks to old friends she's never met, and my old friends meet my neighbors. Our street is lined with unfamiliar cars and filled with kids I don't recognize, biking and playing ball with our own. Baton Rouge is three times its size and growing, and we're not alone: now every major city is home to New Orleans in exile.

Apologies to my fan

2005-08-27T07:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Frontiernet Visitor (aka My One Fan): Thanks for checking in! I've been spending my bloggable time over at Steve's lately. Check it out.

More here soon as possible.

Whither the south

2005-08-22T04:53:00.000-07:00

Reid Farmer, archeologist and contributor to Steve Bodio's blog (see right), keeps our larder filled with bloggable selections from the West Coast press. He recently sent this commentary by Dan Neil from the LA TIMES (entitled, "Vintage Moonshine," with lead-in: What if "The Dukes of Hazzard" was the last Southern narrative?). Mr. Neil wonders what relation the American South might have to its representations in our popular culture; and befitting his location, he leans heavily for evidence on the list of television entertainments produced in his own backyard. My credentials for producing the below response include: (A) I actually live in the South, and (B) Parts of the movie The Dukes of Hazzard were filmed "on location" across the street from my office!

Reid introduces the article: " So this is what smart people in LA think of the South. It's only possible to interpret regional culture through its depiction in TV series!"

My reply:

OK. I don't know this Dan Neil fellow. Maybe he's a pedigreed, academic Southern culture critic. But if so, he seems to take a pretty narrow sample of his topic here: mostly the South as represented by Hollywood sitcoms?

And he sounds a little bit hurt:

"Southerners' ability to laugh at themselves...seems compromised. The jokes on 'Hee Haw' had a charming humility. They came at Southerners' expense, their foibles and limitations. The jokes on the WB's 'Blue Collar TV' are edged witha sense of superiority and skewer the Other, such as Left Coast liberals."

I have to say I'm not too upset our jokes no longer have the necessary air of humility to suit Mr. Neil. And I think we must be forgiven for not always wanting to display our "foibles and limitations" to Left Coast liberals or anyone else.

But then he says some interesting things, too: "Missing Southern men are stock characters defined by their absence." I don't know if that's true (or if it means anything), but it's a thesis that deserves better shift than he gives it.

Finally (best of all) he asks, "Is the South even there anymore?" and that's a damn good question.

My grandfather (a transplanted New Yorker) settled one issue with me before he died: "You and your brother are Southern men," he told us. He was proud of that and wanted us to be. Never mind that we were raised as Army Brats in Alaska, Germany and Panama (but also Texas, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, so maybe...). We finally settled in Georgia as a family (I went to school at Valdosta State, South GA); later I lived in North Florida (which is still in The South) and now Louisiana.

Grandad's kids (Mom and Uncle Jim) were raised in Atlanta and Milledgeville, Georgia. They are children of the "Segregation South," and of relative privilege, which means something with regard to that. Dad was raised poor, mostly on his grandfather's cotton farm in Lubbock, Texas and went to school at the New Mexico Military Institute and Texas A&M. He's a man of the South and a little bit of the Southwest. I went with him once to meet his father in Roswell and could tell Dad knew where he was.

So I'm a Southern man. But does the South still exist? Well, I live someplace and call some place home; and that place is bigger than Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But it does not (cannot) exist only in its representations. Certainly it's got nothing to do with sitcoms.

Mind you I am just now trying to understand all this, and I know I'm at the end of a long line. But to me, the South exists wherever people recognize themselves as belonging to it. That, and more: It's the weather (hot and wet, but beautiful in Spring), the country (topography plus native species---a few regional keystones like live oaks, longleaf and other pines, kudzu [I know it's alien], possums, mockingbirds, and more), an accent (or many accents, somehow allied), a sense of humor both appealing to Mr. Neil and not, music (many kinds but always old and shared), and history as interpreted through your particular generational filter.

Maybe that could be anywhere, minus the possums. Maybe a better question is, "Did the South ever exist?" I'm sure I'm not the first to ask. I think the answer should be much the same, and perhaps the first part of my answer (that of belonging to and identifying with the place), the most important part of living anywhere.

That, and not particularly wanting to live anywhere else.

Words for wendell berry's latest

2005-08-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

Reading Wendell Berry's collected stories, That Distant Land, is like viewing a geologic record of American culture---or maybe its medical record from birth to an early death. Berry writes the history of fictional farming town Port William, Kentucky, from the 1880s forward. Whether his period representations are accurate, I don't have the credentials to know, but as a reader I am utterly enveloped and convinced. Berry's people share purpose and understanding with their animals; they share fate and responsibility and allegiance to their land. That these bonds break apart sometime after World War II and the subsequent marriage of corporations to politicians is Berry's signature theme. Reading him in a suburb, circa 2005, is an exquisitely sad experience.

My view of Berry's message is that we live among the broken pieces of a gift. In its original form, the gift was beautiful and complicated, unquestionably handmade from natural materials. Today it's merely the sum of its parts, some of which were lost in the breaking. My two girls break their toys as a matter of course; some of them I can fix and some aren't worth the effort. Berry's world, which is ours if we want it, is one immanently worth fixing.

Mobbing behavior

2005-08-17T10:01:00.000-07:00

The commonality of human and animal is like the undercurrent of a large river—everything unconscious and autonomic we share, plus what limited achievement of reason we both can manage in times of rapid change. We are much alike under stress. Highminded human jetsam, like wit and physics, are first to go overboard. We fish these out later from shallow eddies downstream.

I am fishing now, de-constructing the mild embarrassment of this morning's commute and rebuilding it with big words.

Last week I switched routes, trading Tiger Town shabby-chic for the relative serenity of the River Road. Traffic along the levee is faster but the blacktop is smoother, and I can be seen from farther away. Passing cars change lanes well in advance instead of dodging me a few yards from impact.

The new route ends at the football stadium, still in construction two weeks before the season's first game. An army of hardhats moves night and day around the project, shuttling platoons of electricians or masons or steelmen in the open beds of pick-up trucks. Pulling up behind one at the stoplight was only a matter of time.

"Cool bike, dude!" The grin was telling even in the dim light. A sturdy-looking nineteen or twenty year old with short blonde hair leaned over the tailgate and looked me in the eye.

"You ever take it off any sweet jumps?"

Laughter erupted from the gallery, and I knew the young man had just scored some points among his fellows. All the witty things I might have said washed overboard. I sat idle, contemplating my plastic sandals.

Mercifully the light changed. The truck turned north on Nicholson, and I peddled into campus.

From the steps of the Student Union, where I look for dead migrant songbirds each morning, I watched the harried passing of a male Cooper's hawk over the live oaks. Three crows, all larger than he, chased and cawed above him, keeping pace. Birds are transparent, doing just the thing on their minds. The hawk's beat of wings—flip, flip, glide; flip, flip, glide—signaled his resignation.

UPDATE: I shared this story with a friend over lunch. She replied without ceasing to chew, "Well. You do have a windshield. On your bike."

A little of falconry

2005-08-14T04:24:00.000-07:00

Afterthoughts on Flying Kestrels
(for the Georgia Falconers Association Blue Darter)

For a little over a decade, between my second year of college and the birth of my twins, I flew American kestrels almost exclusively. These years (and these birds) provided me a sort of graduate education in hawking, complete with “thesis” in the form of American Kestrels in Modern Falconry, first published in 1996 and revised in 2002. I spent the best years of this period in Georgia, living and hunting along a crescent between the peanut country of Donaldsonville and Bainbridge, through Valdosta and Waycross and up the Coastal Empire to Statesboro. I live in Louisiana now, and fly a Harris hawk, but Georgia and the American kestrel are often on my mind.

A strange time followed Western Sporting Publication’s release of my kestrel book in hardcover. I was not then flying a kestrel yet was fielding calls and emails about their training from those who recently bought the book. I felt a little bit dishonest. Two years had passed since my friend Eric Edwards took my kestrel back to Florida, as a favor to a busy new father, and let her go. The daily experience of flying a small hawk was slipping away. I feared it wouldn’t be long before I started making things up.

Now nearly five years after my last kestrel, I find myself flipping through my own book to answer a question or two. But I have not yet succumbed to fibbing. Before that happens, I’d like to share a few management tips that, though I’ve looked for them, do not appear in American Kestrels...

The first one is no secret but is surprising to most. It’s just a useful observation: a kestrel holding prey or other food will shy away when offered a well-garnished glove. You will, in fact, repel your kestrel while trying to call her to you. Many discover this when first approaching their bird on a lure or worse—on wild game. She may shuffle away when offered the glove or carry her sparrow to the roof of the mall.

What’s useful about this? Avoiding it is useful! Once you know to expect the problem, a solution is simple: approach your bird with a small tidbit in the bare right hand. The kestrel will see a gram-sized piece of meat on your finger as more attractive than a split carcass draped across your glove. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.

My next tip also relates to carrying, a chief preoccupation of those who hunt small birds. In short, don’t hunt sparrows from the car. You may know already that starlings feeding beside the road are most vulnerable to a kestrel. A few beats of wing and two birds are balled up, rolling in the grass. But the same slip on a sparrow can tempt even good small falcons to carry. Avoid it until the thrill is greater than the risk.

Rounding out my anti-carrying advice are two short warnings: a kestrel with a sparrow down on open ground will want to carry it. If you can, hunt sparrows near small shrubs so the falcon might rather drag them under than port them away.

Back at home, and all through the hunting season, feed your kestrel on the fist. Resist the convenience of tossing her food and walking away; most will snatch the meat and shuffle or bate with in until you leave. This behavior is telling and will carry over into the field.

Finally, beware The Slow Decline. Here is a problem not generally of the lazy falconer but of the good one. It’s a weight control issue, and to see its effects you must first have mastered that skill. What happens is this: A kestrel, maybe seven weeks in captivity, is hunting well and her falconer dialing the daily weight to the gram. Successful hawking becomes routine, and soon one hunt per day is not enough. The kestrel is fed half rations morning and night and so kept, in essence, perpetually at hunting weight. While this treatment maintains the falcon’s weight for a time (days or few weeks), it initiates a slow decline in the bird’s condition—it’s stamina, muscle tone and functional reserve. While the bird continues to score, it is slowly dying.

The solution here is not to hunt less well but less often: just once a day, for as many kills as you like and your kestrel allows. After the hunt, feed your good bird her full ration, fourteen grams of quality chow. Let her rest. Let her wake late in the morning, bathe and preen. Let her drop weight on a daily cycle and reach the magic number only once, in time for supper.

…Such goode and kinde practise do maketh her flie well!

Ecology of the road

2005-08-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

A smooth forward advance from a comfortable seated position, hands at "ten and two" with elbows relaxed; transportation via recumbent bike feels not unlike driving a car. The distance from your head to the pavement is the same. Your feet are well out in front, spinning in their small orbits of the crank case, and might as well be pressing in a clutch or giving it the gas for all they know. There's even an analogous (and surprising) sense of insulation, once you've added a windshield, long pants and safety glasses---these thin layers offer roughly equal protection from the friction of atmosphere, given the slower speeds.

In short, a bike provides the basics of powered locomotion. The heavy steel and dense plastics of a car come apart as if in exploded view, and what remain are bare essentials: steering column, drive train, transmission, commuter. It is tempting to imagine the bike commuter as a better fit of man to machine, a more efficient animal in the ecology of the suburb. Some calculations support this, as does a certain sense of proper scale. But I wonder. Just where in its habitat does the bike belong?

This morning I heard the low rumble of mastodon in the neighborhood. School is back in session and that behemoth of transportation---the big yellow bus---is back in circulation. After a summer-long effort to carve my place among the swift metallic fauna, I was suddenly demoted to a lower niche. Even the bisonlike SUVs are dwarfed in the midst of suburbia's true Kings of the Road. The school bus is almighty, impervious and nearsighted as a pachyderm.

Reading, writing and 'rithmatic

2005-08-07T18:46:00.000-07:00

Sometime around my fifth year in falconry I wrote my first book on that topic. This is no brag, since the book made print in an edition of five stapled photocopies and contained virtually no factual information at all. Had the Internet been available then, I would probably have published my opus there, for all the world to see. In fact I've seen much similar stuff online since then; and because I appreciate the impulse that gives rise to it (and because I'm equally guilty), I try to be supportive. I imagine the four lucky recipients of my First Edition---all falconry mentors---felt the same. At least they did not laugh out loud.

The impulse to write and the development of the writer are current topics on Steve Bodio's blog, prompted in part by me and taken part in by another falconer, the writer Rebecca O'Connor. I hope others chime in. I have an endless appetite for this topic. I bet all writers and would-be writers do. The impulse to make some kind of art with words is strong in many but evidently stems from sources diverse as writers themselves. Most are rabid readers, then "readers moved to emulation."

The impulse to make a life of writing is something else and more---or as Libby Bodio says, "more and worse." I have it (the impulse, not the life) and it tugs at me. Again, the roads to such a life are varied and twisting, tho I think all of them are pretty well traveled by...

The one I'm on is safe and slow. I write for small profits under the shingle of a Louisiana limited liability co., a freelancer with a few steady clients and enough income from them to afford part-time status at his "day job." This was a baby step compared to those who've leaped off the edge, risking home and family (or rejecting them) for a chance at writing full time. Any quick survey of writer bios will show how much some risk for this.

I am no risk-taker. That's likely a problem, both for the prosperity of a small business and my potential for great art. I'm sure it's no coincidence that my best clients require no great art. They require baskets, little packages for carrying messages; it's more important these baskets be airtight than beautiful, and I can usually manage that.

My question is whether a life weaving baskets can be a good one and sufficient. I think it ought to be.

Small, obvious observation.1

2005-08-04T17:32:00.000-07:00

In what I see as a continuing series of attempts to keep the wheel turning on my blog, here's a small and obvious observation: You see more of nature on a bike than in a car, and perhaps the recumbent bike (its heads-up configuration) is the best of all.

My summertime totem animal, the Mississippi kite, follows me now all the way to work. There are perhaps three pair along the main road out of my neighborhood, two more in Tiger Town and numerous pair---all with flighted young by this month---on campus proper. Their voices, like stuttering penny-whistles, carry a good distance through still morning air. The birds are overhead and calling early, already hunting at 6am. A Mississippi kite, big as a peregrine on the wing and blue as a heron, can stoop from the top of a towering pecan to snatch a moth six inches above a mowed lawn; you miss that from the cab of a truck.

In the last week I've seen two hunting Cooper's hawks, both large females (perhaps the same bird), terrifying the starlings and sending collared doves way above their comfort zone to pitches of 300 feet.

This morning on the last leg of my commute, I saw a single feather in the grass beneath a lamp post on campus. I swung around to pick it up with no more hesitation than a hiker might have. It was the wing feather of a red-tailed hawk. I know that bird too and see him passing every week.

An intimate evening with grayson capps

2005-07-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

The Mississippi is a mile wide and thirty fathoms deep where it loops around the older parts of New Orleans and flows past the French Quarter. Down at the bottom of that dark water must roll a little bit of everything that ever was in the Crescent City. Plastic beads and arrowheads and cypress stumps must churn amid the silt and poison and the bodies of lost people, finally spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. If another stream drags along New Orleans city streets, invisibly sweeping up similar stuff, it must empty into the person of Grayson Capps.

Yesterday I drove the eighty miles from Baton Rouge to spend an evening in the Quarter with friends. Live music on a weeknight is a hard date to keep, but I've been waiting for this since first hearing of Grayson Capps and seeing a movie (adapted from a novel by his dad, Everett, and scored by himself) called, A Love Song for Bobby Long. Capps, happily back from Hollywood, plays guitar on Thursdays at d.b.a., our bar along Frenchmen Street and most familiar, favorite spot.

Like many New Orleans natives, my friends favor what's fine, local, and unique. They get their fill in Grayson, who fits these categories and more. A balladeer, bluesman and sometime barfly, Capps was born and raised in Alabama but lured to New Orleans on a Tulane scholarship and—like others before him—made welcome by her. Here the 37 year old theater major, in a wife-beater and a wild beard, looks right at home on Frenchmen Street. His music, whether solo acoustic or plugged in with his band The Stumpknockers, blends hobo folk, delta blues, southern rock and spoken word. A snippet from his bio says:

"I write songs which have the voice of dead prophets masquerading as town drunks screaming 'look at us we're pretty, too!' I've been playing guitar and singing for nearly twenty years now....Some people call me a preacher others a poet, a singer, a guitar player, a landscaper, but I am only an actor strutting and fretting across the stage."

Grayson wasn't strutting much on Thursday—just perched atop a stool on stage at d.b.a. He played two guitars, one of them in open tuning for slide, and his blues harp behind a couple of tiny mikes. His percussion was a stomping boot against the plywood floor; this twisted and jerked of its own accord and filled the room with sound. Grayson himself seemed to change from song to song, living in them. He rendered some straight and smiling, and others bent into a kind of palsy, each song a small performance of its own.

The one thread tying Capps' varied material together is narrative: His songs are full of French Quarter characters one need not be a native to appreciate or recognize. He calls his adopted neighborhood a "Cannery Row incarnate" and sings about its singular people, the failed and fallen who call it home.

Like Washboard Lisa, the percussionist and "Lucky Strike smokin' queen":

Standing on the corner of Royal Street
on a Sunday afternoon
out there by the old A&P
barefoot in the sun in June

I saw her playing with the Big Mess Band
with Augie Jr. on guitar
I saw her play with John Mooney, too
uptown at Madigan's bar

Washboard Lisa wash away your sins
let 'em go down the drain
every time you move your dirty little hands
takes away our fears and our pain

Or his subject in A Love Song for Bobby Long:

Brewton Called him crazy
said Bobby Long wasn't nothing but a drunk
but all the thoughts in his head was way past anything they done thunk...

Thursday's audience was a small and chatty bunch of Grayson groupies about a dozen strong. Capps opened on time at 6pm and sang till nine, ending with apologies and protests from the regulars. After that he was on to Tipitina's with the Stumpknockers and a bigger if not a better crowd.

In a city that so easily accepts its own and everyone else's, Grayson Capps gives back in kind.

Yellow ribbons

2005-07-28T04:59:00.000-07:00

Staff Sergeant Tyler Williamson of the Louisiana National Guard, my friend and neighbor and fellow father of twin girls, leaves this Sunday on the first leg of a long march that will end in Iraq. He is geared up like no other soldier in US history, better trained and educated. But he is older too at 31, with a house and a fishing boat and a reconstructed knee. He has more to lose than most who've preceded him to earlier wars and more to come home to. He is not atypical among his peers. He could be away for eighteen months or more.

This has been (so far) a war with little visible impact on those of us who don't have to fight in it. We don't ration our food or our fuel or curtail our vacation plans. We can ignore the war almost completely by turning off the TV. Even the tax burden is deferred. But the immediate cost of the war is paid nonetheless, not by all of us together but by a few all at once. Tyler is one.

Impossible to resist

2005-07-24T12:41:00.000-07:00

I almost began this post declaring that, "my blog is neither political nor topical, but.."

But nothing. It is impossible (so far as I've seen) to avoid politics, and what does anyone write about except topics? So it is also impossible to resist this comment, which is really a question: How is sex in video games offensive to adults and dangerous to children, if stealing cars is not?

I am not a "home gamer," although I played arcade-style video games regularly in my teen and pre-teen years (this would be the Pac-Man / Godfather's Pizza Era). I have wasted a few quarters on them since then, also, most recently when taking my own children to a sort of suped-up indoor playground that operates in my parents' home town. I will admit to you (provided you keep it between us) that I played a game there in which you use a mock shotgun to blast holes in zombies lurching at you from a big-screen TV. It was fun.

Because I check the news ticker on Yahoo each morning, I know about "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." I have not played this game, nor seen it played, which probably puts me in company with many others who nonetheless have an opinion on it. Am I right to assume the object of the game (or at least a central feature) is to steal cars and flee from police? Are there gangsters involved? Anyway, these are my operating assumptions.

Given that, what are we to make of prominent politicians expressing outrage upon learning that this putative felony simulator also includes (with necessary modifications to enable this feature) depictions of people having sex? I also have to guess here that the sex depicted is not necessarily between married couples (not that this should make its simulation any more or less offensive.) Where were the official outrage and pleas for the safety of our children when this game was "merely" about stealing cars?

I am honestly confused about this. How can one claim moral victory in a fight against simulated sex when that sex occurs within the (presumably acceptable) context of "Grand Theft Auto?"

UPDATE: According to my wife, who works with student-athletes, this flap is nothing new! Older versions of the game have been controversial for years---for their sexual content but also for the players' option to shoot at the police pursuing them. Wow. I am really out of it.

Don't check here for updates on current technological culture.

Story about lost bones

2005-07-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

Dang, but this is a well-written feature story! Hector, well done.

Bach'n it

2005-07-23T18:09:00.000-07:00

I am sitting tonight beneath my carport in the absence of the four women who help me run my life, day to day. Shelly and her mother Barbara and our two girls are in Houston, Texas, visiting Uncle Josh, whose family has a new member in baby Alex. I am alone, but for the dog, cats and Charlie the Harris hawk.

I am reading a collection of stories by Wendell Berry, some of which I have already read. The current one includes the character Burley Coulter, who is a hunter and the most like myself of Berry's characters, tho not necessarily the one most like the person I'd like to be.

My neighbor's teenage boy is shooting hoops with a friend. They are working at this in the twilight, discussing something important that I cannot quite make out beneath the tympanic pounding of the basketball against a concrete driveway. It is a familiar sound and the normal course of my evenings, even when the girls are home.

I took this boy hawking last year, late in the season, after a long-standing invitation that may have originated before he was in fact a teenager. His father accompanied us on a very cold, bright day across two or three fields in Port Allen, which lies directly across the Mississippi to our west. We failed at the first place, failed again in a few opportunistic shots at starlings from the cab of the truck and then succeeded in a rabbit spot off Highway 1.

Charlie caught the very largest swamp rabbit of the season there, just out of sight of the boy and his father. They both waited for me along a power cut as I worked a tall, contiguous briar patch with Charlie looking on from the treeline. I have never seen anyone so unimpressed by the sight of a successful hunt as this boy or his dad.

Charlie, who weighs in at about a pound and has measurements about the same as the last parrot you saw, is in fact a tiny dinosaur with two vise grips for feet and eight iron nails for toes. He is fearless as a hurricane and smart as dog. This hawk bound to the head of a five pound, adult male swamp rabbit whose life he could no more take without my help than that of a horse. I helped; and then I carried the two of them back through the briar above my head, having slid my carry-pole into my belt like a samuri sword. I laid the pair at their feet, offering the best I had.

A tiger town blessing

2005-07-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

What you can do on a bike, but less well in a car, is pull abruptly off the road in front of someone without scaring her. From the cab of my truck I might have sped past the small woman unknowing, over the rise of the rail bed and left onto Nicholson. But we recognized each other from a block away and had plenty of time as I peddled closer to consider what we should do.

I pulled off the road and into the parking lot where she stood, waiting for me. Her little dog pulled gently against its leash then stood also, waiting for her.

"Good morning!"

"Hello again!"

On a recumbent bike, you don't dismount so much as just stand up. When I did so, I was glad to have the handlebars and windshield between us. Otherwise I would have towered over her.

"I have something for you."

I reached into my backpack, feeling past my change of clothes and my lunchtime reading, but did not find what I was hunting. At some point in the last few weeks I must have thrown away the screen print from a website for small recumbent bikes and trikes. I wanted to give this to her but was embarrassed now and wished I had waved and kept going.

"You know I looked those up on the Internet," she offered, pointing at my bicycle in the momentary lull. "They make small ones. Three-wheelers, too. I had no idea."

I knew somehow then that it was settled. She had no serious plans to purchase a bike and would need no help finding a local dealer. Her dog would miss the morning walk, for one.

I was less embarrassed now, thanks to that. I told her about the lost printout and she shrugged, smiling.

"Well bless you for thinking of me!"

The little dog pulled again at its leash and we parted company.

Activity budget

2005-07-19T05:24:00.000-07:00

My university degree, earned (finally) by 1994 from Valdosta State, in South Georgia, and unused except to establish my basic qualification for a middle-class job, was as Bachelor of Sociology. It was a good course of study for a mediocre but personable student with some aptitude for learning a lingo. I had no fear of writing essays, which, when chopped into four subtitled parts and sprinkled with lingo, served as the official language of the department. I wrote about three essays a week, attended most of my classes, hunted twice a day and drank a lot of beer. It's no mystery that education is expensive.

I remember some things about my chosen field. A few essential concepts. Emile Durkheim=suicide, for example. And N=the number of examples from which your conclusions are drawn; an "N of 1" was sufficient for most conclusions at the undergraduate level.

I also remember the term "activity budget," which may actually have come from my concentration in anthropology (not quite a minor). This concept helps describe how one spends one's day: A look at the "activity budget" of the student in Paragraph One might reveal more to his parents than would be revealed, say, in a phone call. So, good science.

Looking at how you spend your day is worth the effort, whether or not there's an essay in it for you. Taking notes and marking time may not be necessary. But knowing generally what you've done today and why, and why not something else, is intrinsically valuable and (to me) often surprising.

I realize at once that I don't do very much from day to day. I rise, wash, eat, travel to and spend some time at the office, eat some more, sit some more, travel home, play with my children, hunt (in season), read a bit or write, eat again and go to bed. At more or less random intervals I talk to co-workers, friends, my wife (who works across campus) and surf the Net. All of this, while still able to make one feel busy, can seem unfulfilling. It is virtually our culture to be unfulfilled in this way, or perhaps, it is our virtual culture that seems lacking.

What is virtual culture? Forget for a minute the obvious reference to this medium. I mean that for few (or none) of the activities in our day do we actually perform work. We simply pay cash or credit. If instead, like most of the people who have ever lived, we did work to make food; to create or maintain our modes of transport and shelter; to entertain ourselves and our children; to strengthen and understand our marriages, we would be more busy yet in ways more complex and satisfying. And we would spend less money.

Our so-called free time, which is more beneficial to entertainment industries, energy corporations and retail sales outlets than to us, is in fact hugely expensive. The expense is staggering in dollar amounts and devastating in other, more important terms. I think every social ill that is uniquely ours to suffer stems from our new economy----an economy of leisure. The good news, I suppose, is that this economy is unsustainable. The bad news, of course, is that too few know how to live another way.

I am not suggesting I am one. A sudden end to fossil fuel would send me reeling, shocked as anyone at all the things I take for granted. But looking again at the course of my day I see clues. These few ridiculous and backward but immensely satisfying efforts I make to adopt an older way (of hunting; of making food; of travel; of passing time) are exactly the kinds of things that would fill my day in a world without fossil fuel. I am not preparing for Armageddon. Let me assure you. I am just having fun, following an impulse that feels right. But there is something to this impulse that, were it more common and were I in Energy or Entertainment or Retail Sales, I would find most discomforting.

You don't really want to know

2005-07-16T14:53:00.000-07:00

About a week ago I added a site meter to the blog. This service let's you see who, if anyone other than youself, checks in. At first it showed only me. Checking in. To see if I had added anything, I guess.

But today there are more, and now I think maybe I really didn't want to know this much. But this is the internet for you. A small (representative?) sample [that in no way constitutes an endorsement of products or services, or evidence of personal or professional relationship to any individual or group listed below. But it is sort of fascinating.]:

3 http://travelgayzette.blogspot.com/
4 http://primary0.blogspot.com/
5 http://biggerthanbritney2.blogspot.com/
6 http://nearby2500.blogspot.com/
7 http://tobermorychronicle.blogspot.com/
8 http://myleanni.blogspot.com/
9 http://vonruben.blogspot.com/
10 unknown
11 http://in-nerpower.blogspot.com/
12 http://hezkyholky.blogspot.com/
13 http://missetan.blogspot.com/

Fab times

2005-07-16T04:42:00.000-07:00

A recent notice from my friend Bill Thompson: the librarian ironist, the Ph.D. poet and past champion of the "inter-office moo" as under-appreciated form of communication; my sometime co-author and co-conspirator on most of the above, and most recently the producer of evocative photographs of Macomb, IL and beyond. Sometimes far beyond.

His quasi blog-slash-visual record of friends and events illustrates what I am always surprised (and pleased) to know exists somewhere out amongst all that corn.

"After a longish, if fabulous, absence, the FAB TIMES re-emerges
from its fall, winter, spring hibernation with a year long
retrospective... http://www.fabtimes.net/june20_2005/"

Everybody's sun valley

2005-07-14T15:48:00.000-07:00

It's not possible to know enough about Ernest Hemingway. There are too many people ahead of you. The line is just that long, and look who's standing in it. What a crowd! There's my mom over there, a woman who could not possibly know how right Hemingway was about hunting. Up ahead a bit further, that's Steve Bodio. He knows hunting. But does he know Paris? Maybe so.

All I know about Paris is that Hemingway was right about it. He had to be.

How else does a writer reach so many and such different people unless he tells the truth? What else but the truth is so generally of value?

This story might start a land rush in a certain region of Idaho. For some, the line was not too long to see it to the end:

[snipped]..."Arnold, who died in January at the age of 99, will be buried in a plot next to Hemingway's grave on July 21, the author's 106th birthday. The body of Arnold's husband, another old Hemingway pal who died in 1970, has been dug up from an Iowa graveyard to be placed in the plot in Ketchum next week.
"Historians and Hemingway buffs say the burial of Tillie and Lloyd Arnold helps complete the circle of friends Hemingway made during his two-decade relationship with Idaho, where the Nobel Prize-winning writer shot himself to death in 1961 after a career that produced such famous books as 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'The Old Man and the Sea.'

"Two former hunting guides are just a plot or two away, as is Chuck Atkinson, the Ketchum motel owner who was with Hemingway the day before he committed suicide. Six members of Hemingway's family, including two sons and his fourth wife, Mary, are also buried there.

"Even before the Arnolds, a Hemingway scholar from the University of North Carolina, John Bittner, asked to be buried in the cemetery as close to "Papa's" grave as possible when he died in 2002." --JOHN MILLER, Associated Press Writer

The man in my life

2005-07-11T17:17:00.000-07:00

Stepping outside a house full of women, three of them, much loved, young and older, but busy being women, is like the first few seconds of a long swim underwater. You are suddenly alone, suddenly free until your next breath. So you hold it.

Hemingway seemed to spend a lot of time with women, by his own accounting. Whether he understood them is debated (I suppose it is; I am not a Hemingway scholar, but you would hardly need to be). But he knew how men think and behave in the company of women and what they do alone, and why. I think it's all tied up together.

This passage isn't necessarily about men with or without women, but it's one that grabbed me today as I left the house after diner and found the deck chair outside. From A Moveable Feast:

"Travel writers wrote about men fishing in the Seine as though they were crazy and never caught anything; but it was serious and productive fishing. Most of the fishermen were men who had small pensions, which they did not know then would become worthless with inflation, or keen fishermen who fished on their days or half-days off from work. There was better fishing in Charenton, where the Marne came into the Seine, and on either side of Paris, but there was very good fishing in Paris itself. I did not fish because I did not have the tackle and I preferred to save my money to fish in Spain. Then too I never knew when I would be through working, nor when I would have to be away, and I did not want to become involved in the fishing which had its good times and its slack times. But I followed it closely and it was interesting and good to know about, and it always made me happy that there were men fishing in the city itself, having sound, serious fishing and taking a few fritures home to their families."

A late book review

2005-07-10T15:40:00.000-07:00

Training the Short-Winged Hawk

An Elizabethan Perspective

Edited and Transcribed by Derry Argue

“…if I cannot set down sufficient reasons for my proceedings, my hawks shall testify for me…”

Any writer about falconry would love to be able to make that statement. Few writers would dare, and a hawker who makes the claim risks serious embarrassment by his own hawk!

But Edmund Bert, still talking a little trash after 400 years, wasn’t just any hawker.

Consider the eyebrows he must have raised with comments like this:

“I know many will say they have had hawks, that if they had once seen a pheasant, that then they would kill no more partridges that year: it is very likely there have been many such [hawks]; and as I confess that, so I pray you give me leave to think that fault is not with them, but in the unskillfulness of their keeper.”

Backing his views with plenty of “sufficient reasons,” Bert proceeds to counsel on this problem and numerous others regarding the training of goshawks. As a practical man, Bert is careful to show his opinions are rooted in undisputed field success; and as often as possible, he makes clear whose opinions are not!

“I would advise you herein, but all is in the practice and handling; I will tell you my course, if I meet with such a hawk, and my reasons for it, contrary to most men’s opinions.”

I imagine Bert enjoyed a tight circle of admirers in his day and at least as many who would rather die than ask his advice. We are lucky he chose finally to write it down.

Equally fortunate are we for the work of Great Britain’s Derry Argue, who is within Bert’s modern circle of admirers and is his most recent publisher. In Training the Short-Winged Hawk: An Elizabethan Perspective, Argue returns to us the hard-won advice of two past masters of the accipiter. Due to his careful and knowing transcriptions, we read anew Edmund Bert’s classic, An Approved Treatise on Hawks and Hawking (1619) and the anonymous yet enduring work, A Perfect Booke for Kepinge of Sparhawkes or Goshawkes (1575).

Though Argue calls his work “transcription,” something closer to translation must have been necessary to make the Old English words and fonts comprehensible. How many of us today would gladly dive into anything like a “booke for kepinge sparhawkes?” Though I own an earlier facsimile of Bert’s original treatise, I admit I never got far into it. Thanks to this new edition, I probably never will.

In his excellent introduction to both texts, Argue does more than explain what choices he made in the transcription of various words and phrases. He provides a complete primer for each volume, providing necessary background and a sort of road map for the terrain ahead. This makes the slight work of deciphering what original grammar remains (Argue chose artfully here) a pleasure akin to exploring an old and quaint city quarter.

For any falconer, but especially for those of us who love the short-wings and hope to fly them well, I offer my highest recommendation of this book. I soon found in reading, as did Derry Argue in editing, that “…I have become rather fond of Edmund Bert and I think I would have enjoyed his company.”

A few made-up facts and figures

2005-07-08T07:27:00.000-07:00

From the Summary of LSU Parking & Traffic Analysis, May 2005:

The issues that the consultants were instructed to address included:

Perceptions of parking and transportation problems and the expectations of the University
community.
Adequacy of parking and transit for resident students, commuter students, and faculty/staff.
Adequacy of linkages between parking areas, residential areas and academic areas.
The role of peripheral shuttle parking vs. convenient structured parking.
Issues of access to Campus destinations related to heavy volumes of traffic accessing the Core Campus.

Conflicts between pedestrians and vehicular traffic.

We are a University of about 30,000 students and perhaps 2,500 faculty and staff. Most drive to work and park on campus. LSU approved 18,739 parking permits last year and estimates another 10,598 people used public transport. That leaves about a thousand folks (by my faulty arithmetic) walking or peddling to school: Is that .03 percent?

Given that the Parking Master Plan acknowledges, ”campus has serious issues related to conflicts between pedestrians and heavy volumes of vehicular traffic,” and suggests “that the University consider implementing techniques to modify user behavior to reduce parking demand,” one might hope to see an effort supporting bike commuters, or even acknowledging them. But what I find are plans for new parking garages and a substantial five-year hike to permit fees to pay for them.

Cars as revenue generators could seem at first (to any able conspiracy theorist) an attractive idea. But the numbers published by the Office of Public Safety don’t support that: Parking permit, traffic ticket and other auto-related fees generated 5.2 million for the University last year; but it cost 5.1 million to fund the administration of campus transit. Not much of a cash-cow there, but maybe I am missing something?

I think it more likely that cars are simply "a given." Nothing sinister about that. When Americans move about, we drive. When our cars are not in motion, they must be parked somewhere. They take up space either way, thus space must be planned and provided.

But such space! More faulty math: 105 square feet per parking spot times 18,739 cars equals nearly 2 million square feet of hot, hard (poisonous?) pavement....45 acres of it.

Cruising altitude

2005-07-07T07:23:00.000-07:00

Topography is a novelty in southeast Louisiana. Two "Indian m0unds," 5,000 year old oyster shell middens in the middle of campus, serve as our Everest and our Kilimanjaro. Children slide down them on cardboard sleds, and students seek them as high places of respite from the rigors of undergraduate life.

There is even a climb to reach base camp: North Stadium Drive rises sharply by local standards, forcing walkers to lean forward and cyclists to stand on their pedals. Since a recumbent bike makes pedal standing impossible, I gear down and toil against the grade at maximum RPM. My forward motion is slow but steady. My wife, working from an office within the stadium, hopes never to witness this painful spectacle.

From the main campus plateau, the balance of my ride is a winding cruise beneath canopy oaks. Students are few at that hour but the grounds crews are gathering and the early-bird office dwellers slipping into prime parking spots. I admire their choices: first in line before a right turn and in full shade, the dividends of a dawn commute.

None, of course, can beat my parking space on price or convenience.

Mile three

2005-07-05T05:13:00.000-07:00

Here I climb the raised rail bed to leave Tiger Town behind. The third mile is flat and open. A bumpy asphalt bike trail runs parallel and slightly beneath car traffic and roaring semi-trailers on Nicholson Avenue. The University golf course borders the bike trail, and across Nicholson, new high-rise condominiums and a sprawling shopping center cover what used to be the front nine...Ecologically speaking, it was probably an even trade.

Switching from car lane to bike trail is likely the most dangerous part of my morning commute. The blind rise across the tracks and a left turn into oncoming traffic call for close attention. But given that, the reward is immediate: the rail bed falls away and the steep grade gives a satisfying boost to the first few hundred feet of peddling. Any cars stuck at the traffic light recede behind me, further enhancing the illusion of speed. By the time they catch up, I am moving at a good clip; reduced is that peculiar feeling of shame that accompanies a struggling cyclist in the midst of passing automobiles.

The golf course and the uniform rooflines of the shopping center push the horizon back far enough to see some weather. Tropical Storm Cindy roiled to the southeast this morning, a smoky cuticle of swirling clouds. But the remaining two-thirds of morning sky were clear, and the air fresh with storm breeze.

Stopping to cross Nicholson at the edge of the University, I face east, rest my legs and drain the rest of my coffee. The sunrise is variable and usually good, and I know as weeks go by I'll see it rising later here, relative to the tops of campus live oaks.

Quote break

2005-07-04T06:10:00.000-07:00

My reading list is usually two or three books deep, the ready fodder stacked on the top-left corner of a shelf in my study. So long as I pass by the Barnes and Noble once a month or so, it never reaches bottom. My parents, both huge print consumers, take a more horizontal approach, reading three or four books at once and leaving one each near favorite chairs around the house.

If I read two books at once, one of them has to be a collection of essays or else short enough to finish in a sitting. I can't keep more than one full narrative going in my head, which might say something important about me.

Sometimes the essay breaks are essential. I am still reading Miracles, by C.S. Lewis, the fourth (and most difficult for me) of his I've worked through to date (after Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters). Many thanks, by the way, to my brother Philip for these books...

I am struggling with Miracles, less so for the suspension of disbelief required (Lewis has already sold me on the possibilities) than for the complexity of his argument. More or less like the others, it combines logic and analogy I can usually follow with doctrine and Biblical reference that are supportive but unfamiliar to me. And every few pages, Lewis will throw in a sentence almost casually that, if swallowed, makes the following pages sensible. But if read again in isolation, and swished around a bit in the mouth, makes no sense to me at all.

So I reach for the essays.

The Writing Life: Writers On How They Think and Work is a collection from the Washington Post BOOK WORLD, edited and introduced by Marie Arana. There are some great essays in it. This morning I read one by Carl Sagan, an old "friend" of mine from the early days of paradigm formation. The following quote seems a kind of parallel appeal to Lewis's, but from another quarter: the common thread of each seems to be, "The truth belongs to everyone, but finding it requires work and sustained effort against competing forces." Or something like that.

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time--when we're a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what is true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition."

...Happy Independence Day!

Tiger town

2005-07-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

"Live Where Your Dad Had a Life," reads a large sign off Nicholson Avenue where it turns, over the tracks, into the loose compound of apartment buildings, quick marts and college bars known as Tiger Town. The good pavement ends, becoming pitted and buckled concrete, flecked with bits of asphalt and broken glass. It's a peril to bike tires.

I enter Tiger Town from the opposite end each morning, peddling along a back street beneath a canopy of mature crepe myrtles--elegant trash trees. I am reminded almost every trip of the strange, animated short feature from vintage (my generation) Sesame Street: the one with the bizarree landmarks, the juggling monster and the magic fountain, etc., that teach two youngsters how to find their way home. At least that's how I remember it. Tiger Town is like that.

A well dressed, gently insane man stands on the same corner each morning, just past the crepe myrtles. He gestures emphatically, strikes poses and makes faces at passing cars. He seems deeply concerned, then in a flash, full of hilarity. He waves at every driver, but turns his back to me always, seeming impatient that I get past him and he on with his work.

At least once a month, I meet a very small woman walking beside the road. She is about the height of five-year old, though perhaps in her mid-forties. We spoke once at the Winn-Dixie, recognizing each other (she is unmistakable, but I was surprised to be recognized without helmet and steed). She mentioned my bike and asked if they make one to fit her. They do, and since that conversation I've kept a laser copy of various specialty recumbent bikes and trikes in my backpack, waiting to see her again.

Mohammad owns at least one of the liquor stores in Tiger Town. He lives in a new section of my own neighborhood and drives a large, white SUV to work. I met him at the park two years ago, each of us on duty with kids. Dads are easy conversationalists; the humor and pride of having charge of small children is mutually disarming.

Mohammad's shop is conjoined with Domino's Pizza into a tiny strip mall behind two large nightclubs. The pavement gets an extra topping of broken glass at that point, and I take care in passing. Once, shortly after taking up the bike commute, Mohammad spotted me in transit: "My neighbor! You are so far from home!" Mohammad's shop sits at the end of the second mile.

Four miles in twenty minutes

2005-07-02T19:49:00.000-07:00

You can get there in fifteen, if you drive. The River Road is shorter and safer by car in the early morning. And that road, between the Mississippi levee and a wide pasture owned by the University, is prettier than the one I take with bike.

But the first mile is the same for either route. It takes you through our neighborhood to the main road, an intersection from which you can see west to the grassy levee and north across two cow paddocks to the partial skeleton of Tiger Stadium, still under construction.

I go East in the morning at six-ten AM, merging into a light traffic. On the way, I sometimes surprise a barred owl—often heard but seldom seen—hunting from a wire near the School for The Deaf, which marks the end of the first mile.

Within that mile I pass the home of friends Herb and Jamie, who let our twins swim in their pool. I pass Tyler and Ann, a few years younger than Shelly and I, with twin girls of their own. Tyler is a Staff Sergeant in the National Guard and bound for Baghdad by the end of the month. He'll blog from there, I hope.

Shelly's boss Jack lives one street over, and turns pro baseball bats in his backyard and spare time. The wife and daughter of Jeff Boss, long-standing and much loved manager for the LSU Tigers, live in a house on my route. Jeff died more than a year ago of cancer.

Beyond that house I am reduced to recognizing familiar faces. I wave at the same walkers of dogs and lift my coffee to the same man in his bathrobe, either bending to pick up his morning paper or about to. I don't know his name or anyone else's until I get to Mohammad's gyro and liquor shop in the middle of Tiger Town. But that's mile two.

The way to work

2005-07-01T06:14:00.000-07:00

I bike to work most every day now, but I had to ramp up to it. Nightly rides around the block, then a couple times to the office on weekends, and finally, the actual morning commute. Forget what the evangelists say: it takes more than a bike and a job to become a bike commuter. You have to become "a bike person," which is to step into another style of life. For those of us accoustomed to driving, it can be a big step.

About three months ago, a local bike shop advertised its annual going-out-of-business sale. This is the shop that supplied my "mountain bike" (FYI mountains are scarce in Louisiana), my kids' bikes and our Burley trailer. The salesman/owner is a likeable, slightly shady character who knows a lot about bikes and even more about selling them. He owns two shops in town, and they've been going out of business for years.

At any rate, one of them finally gave up the ghost in a month-long extravaganza of cash-only high pressure sales. I succumbed. I bought not only the recumbent bike I did not mean to buy, but also a useless metal stand for same. But what a deal! $400 OFF a Sun E-Z Rider, which unlike the extremely sexy "short wheel-base" roadsters I fancied, is a longer, somewhat retro flying machine. Its lines take some getting used to, but it has the most comfortable seat I've ever lent a butt cheek.

I modified it over the first few weeks: headlights, taillights, front fender, partial fairing (that's a windshield for you non-bike-persons), reflective tape, mirrors, a cooler (no kidding), trunk for spare parts and a bike lock. It's as if, in anticipation of the rolling eyes, I went ahead and gave them something to laugh about.

Next issue, the ride.

Welcome, wherever we are

2005-06-30T06:10:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my second attempt at blogging. Unlike the first, which pretty much kept to its topic (my falconry season of 02/03), this one might range a little bit farther afield.

I am starting the blog with one sketchy assumption: that my interests and instincts (falconry falls into both categories) are forming something like a theme. I don't yet have a name for the theme, but Waypoints seems an appropriate description. Interests in raising good children, good tomatoes, and good hawks; keeping my wife happily married (to me); biking to work; making my coffee "the old fashioned way;" reading Wendell Berry, C.S. Lewis, Steve Bodio, and every other good writer/thinker; being true to my friends and fair to everyone else....

Is there something more here than the creeping eccentricity of a man near mid-life? Maybe not. But what's the harm in asking?

Best,