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For The Birds

It’s the day after Christmas and I am asking myself why I am so dumbfoundingly optimistic.

It is no longer illegal to negligently kill migratory birds. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act prohibits killing migratory birds without a license. Up until recently, the law was interpreted to mean that birds killed as a result of oil spills, destroying their habitat, or otherwise interfering, resulted in federal prosecution and fines.

No more. You can still be prosecuted if you intentionally kill a migratory bird without a license, but not if the bird happens to be killed in the pursuit of some other goal. For example, an eagle killed by a wind turbine used to be subject to a $15,000 fine, oil spills that killed thousands of shore birds resulted in massive fines, projects that destroyed nesting grounds were subject to fines and injunctions without some mitigation such as providing an alternative nesting environment. Today none of that applies if you are operating a wind turbine, shipping oil, or paving nesting grounds into parking lots but your goal is making money rather than killing birds. (Detail here.)

This saddens me because seeing eagles turning circles over Ferndale, snow and Canada geese in the fields of the Nooksack valley and flats, and ducks in almost any body of water in Whatcom County all remind me that the world we have all been given is magnificent.

I’m not squeamish about killing birds. My dad encouraged my cousins and me to shoot English sparrows and starlings when I was a kid. He was not sympathetic toward invasive species, although we immigrant Germans and Dutchmen were invasive tribes ourselves.

Duck and goose hunting were all part of the grand tradition when I was in junior high (middle school.) In the fall, a bloodthirsty knot of boys would gather before first period and talk about who shot what that morning out at Tennant Lake and the innumerable ponds that surround Ferndale. I wished I were among the guys who were out wading in the cold and wet while hunting game birds, but my dad wanted me helping with milking, not messing with exciting and dangerous weapons.

He hunted himself when he was young. The few times I saw him fire a gun, he hit his target accurately. He was not sentimental about animals, but he was always on the watch for signs of wildlife around the farm and I suspect that, all things equal, he was on the side of the ducks, geese, and pheasants.

Think about the law for a minute. Who kills birds intentionally? These days, almost entirely sport hunters. I have nothing against hunting. It’s no longer my choice for recreation, but sport hunters guard our wildlife more carefully than a lot of sentimental enthusiasts who only think about wildlife occasionally. Hunters cull herds and keep them healthy, unlike massive collateral damage from industrial ventures that destroy habitats and wipe out entire species. The law now only limits folks who care about birds and gives free reign to industries who destroy species pursuing profits.

There’s a pond close to our house in Ferndale. Albert, The Border Collie, and I walk around the pond every morning and evening. I don’t know the history of the pond, but I suspect that it didn’t exist in my junior high school days. It has the look of a bulldozer sculpture, built for runoff control rather than a naturally occurring resting place for migrating geese and ducks. Nevertheless, I am happy to see the number of birds, raccoons, possums, deer, rabbits, and squirrels that Albert and I encounter on our walks.

The pond would have been in Allen Gardiner’s backyard. I haven’t seen or heard from Allen since high school, but I owe him a debt. One day in the Frank Alexander Junior High library, he pointed me toward a shelf of books by Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author, and started me on a science fiction binge in the seventh or eighth grade that I haven’t quite shaken yet. I wouldn’t be who I am today without Allen’s prompting. Not that I’m anything special, but I just wouldn’t be who I am.

Getting back to the pond. A few days ago, night and morning, I counted twenty-three geese, maybe two dozen mallards, three drake mergansers and I’ll bet three female mergansers were lurking and diving, a blue heron perched in a tree, and a seagull bobbing on the water. The following afternoon, I saw maybe a dozen mallards, one merganser drake, and Albert spotted a squirrel. (He keeps an exact tally of squirrels.) The heron and geese were gone.

I haven’t seen as many geese as last year this fall; I miss those noisy honkers and prolific poopers. I am not about to say that the changes in migratory bird regulation has had immediate effect, but this temporary paucity reminds me of what I will miss as wildlife disappears.

Until the community takes a stand, wildlife of all forms will become rarer and harder to experience. When there is money to be made, there is always someone willing to grab a buck and trash what other people care about. Practically, sometimes a small sacrifice may be justified, but a balance must be struck. When something dies, money can’t buy it back or fix it. Lose too much and we all have nothing.

We once cared. Raptors were rare in the skies over Waschke Road when I was growing up, but after DDT and other pesticides were regulated, the hawks and eagles returned.

So. I am optimistic. If we once cared, we can care again.

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Short Days—Long Nights

Mid-December days in Ferndale, stranded on the northern edge of the continental U.S., sunlight is in short supply. When Albert, the border collie, takes me out around the Gardiner pond in the morning, the sun is barely risen, and he has trouble herding me out there before sunset in the afternoon. In all this gloom, I was looking for adventure last week, so I drove to Montana and back again.

Our daughter completed her first semester of law school in Missoula last Friday. She and her sons could have traveled by train or airplane, but I was in adventure mode, so at 5:30 am Friday the 13th, I fired up my wife’s SUV that wouldn’t make it up the little hill to our house in the snow last winter and went off in the darkness to pick them up and bring them back for Christmas. December isn’t the most interesting month to drive I-90, but it gets close.

In these short days, the trip began and ended in the dark, both coming and going. That’s about how I feel in 2019 in general, so there was nothing special there.

The path from Ferndale to Missoula threads over three mountain passes: Snoqualmie, Fourth of July, and Look Out. Our house on Vista Drive in Ferndale is 154 feet above sea level; downtown Ferndale is only 36 feet. Snoqualmie summit is 3,022 feet, Fourth of July pass in Idaho is 3,081, and Lookout Pass on the Idaho-Montana border is 4,711 feet. Missoula is higher than the Snoqualmie at 3,209 feet. In other words, I had my ups and downs last weekend.

The adventure was tame, as befits an arthritic geezer. Both Snoqualmie and Fourth of July were bare wet pavement both coming and going. Mid-morning Friday, the sunshine revealed two beached and dug in semis that must have slid off the road on ice around Cle Elum, but that happened hours before I sailed through. Lookout Pass eastbound was slushy and busy. No real danger. Coming down Lookout, boxed in by big trucks front and back, squeezed between the concrete jersey barrier and another truck, and dirty slush flying everywhere, barely evoked philosophical thoughts on the fragility of these carcasses we carry around. It was snowing hard when we left Missoula, but Montana snowplow crews know their business. Maybe next time will have more adventure.

I like the freshwater flyover country, as the vast tract of the U.S. that is not on a seacoast is called by disrespectful coastervators. I’ve always liked it, and I like it better now. My Dutch and German ancestors established themselves in Michigan and Minnesota before coming to Whatcom County. When I was growing up, I heard stories about “Back East,” which referred to the Midwest rather than the east coast. When neighbors got together to talk, the east coast, New York, New England, the southern eastern seaboard were seldom mentioned, but the conversation often drifted into reminiscing on life in the Midwest. People occasionally took trips to see relatives back east, but seldom did that mean seeing the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve been on the east coast many times because I worked for a New York company, but I still get north and south confused when the ocean is to the east.

Fifty years ago, I went to college and graduate school in the Midwest and I soon noticed that Midwesterners were behind the west coast, even dear old Ferndale. The fonts on street signs were not as modern. The buildings were older, stores were laid out like throwbacks from decades in the past. I knew nothing of New York then, but a lot of New Yorkers were among my fellow students, and they all said Chicago was way out of step. Of course, there never has been and never will be anything as in step as New York, in the opinion of a New Yorker.

I think it’s the internet.

I poked around Missoula during my one day there. I discovered that Missoula has more local breweries than Bellingham or hop city Yakima. I sampled several Missoula IPAs that proved that their brewers know distinctive hop flavors and how to blend them. A far cry from the watery “fire brewed for the flamin’ a—” Stroh’s and Iron City Pittsburgh beer that I remember from college.

I visited the University of Montana Law Library and the Missoula Public Library. The law library was sleek and new; the public library was nice, but crowded, the carpets had seen better days, and the furniture was worn. However, the staff pointed across the street to a large new library under construction. Missoula’s computer network is fast. I was told that they are almost entirely fiber. A city on the move as fast as New York or San Francisco.

I am getting old, but I think something is happening in this country that has not been noticed. Computer networks and the social media, other new forms of communication, have been excoriated for causing divisiveness and polarization, but I have begun to suspect that these vicious trends are being whittled away from the ground up by the very means of communication that are condemned as the cause.

I remember how isolated I felt before computer networks connected everyone. Today, no one has to wonder what is going on with the hipsters of Brooklyn— you can easily find out firsthand by following them on Twitter, Instagram, reading their blogs, or friending them on Facebook. (And see how silly they can be.) Like the proverbial canine, on the internet, no one knows you’re from Ferndale, Missoula, Austin, New Orleans, or NYC. In Missoula, people on the street, the streets themselves, could have been in New York, or the Bay Area, Boston, or Austin. I discussed hops with bartenders and library trends with Missoula’s library staff; we shared a base of knowledge that would have been impossible even ten years ago. This was not bland leveling, more like everyone being their best selves.

The days are short now and the nights are long. But winter solstice is close. The days will get longer; we will see more sunshine. Winter won’t be over, but spring is on the horizon.

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Getting Ready for Christmas

My neighbors in Ferndale are putting up ambitious displays of Christmas lights and decorations. I’ve only gotten as far as getting some holly trimmings from the Waschke Homestead and wiring together a wreath for our front porch. My neighbor’s work reminds me that Christmases sixty years and more ago were quite different.

Whatcom County settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were mostly northern Europeans: Scandinavians, Germans, and Dutch. My great grandparents were born in Holland and Germany, migrating to Whatcom County via Michigan and Minnesota in the Midwest. They brought Christmas traditions with them.

My Dutch grandparents were stern Calvinists who preferred their holidays on the solemn side, but German Lutherans reveled in Christmas tradition, an occasion for noisy family gatherings and extended visits. I grew up in the same house and later across the road from my German grandparents, so I know their traditions best.

Christmas trees are a German custom. My dad told us about Christmas trees in the old farmhouse decorated with burning candles and balls of cotton. Grandpa would cut a fir or hemlock in the woods and put it up on Christmas Eve afternoon. First lighting of the tree was after Christmas Eve church. They kept the tree and lit it regularly until Epiphany nearly two weeks later. Without water. Yikes! The rest of Christmas was less hair-raising.

My German grandmother was born in Germany, arriving on Ellis Island when she was twelve and travelling with her family directly to Whatcom County. She was my most direct connection to German Christmas traditions.

Grandma had cookbooks, but I never saw her using one. She cooked by taste, instinct, and practice. At Christmas, her talents flowered. Christmas dinner was a roast goose, not a turkey, stuffed with a sweet stuffing made from dry bread, apples, raisins, sugar, and cinnamon.

One secret of her roast goose was her bread, which she always baked herself. My mother baked bread too, but I liked Grandma’s better. Grandma saved the water from boiling potatoes for bread baking in a large Horlick’s Malted Milk jar that we now have on display in our living room. She may have used some milk also, and I am sure she used ordinary white flour. I remember watching Grandma bake bread, but the only other detail I recall is that she used a yeast cake that she would soak in water on baking day mornings. She had a combination wood and electric oven and she had a fire burning in the fire box when she baked, which may have had something to do with her results.

I’ve never had bread like hers anywhere else. Her loaves were rounded, and the crust was crisp like a French baguette, but not as tough. The texture was coarser and dryer with larger air holes than my mother’s bread. The taste was floury without sourness. Grandma would give me thick slices with butter as a snack. For herself, instead of toast, she cut bread into cubes and fried them in butter in a cast iron frying pan. I still remember the smell.

Few days before Christmas, Grandma put bread slices in a large sky-blue enameled steel basin to dry. Early Christmas morning, she would crumble the bread and add sliced apples, raisins, and a sprinkling of cinnamon and sugar. She would also lightly fry the chopped giblets in butter with salt and pepper and mix them into the stuffing. If she decided the mixture was too dry, she’d add milk. At this point, the scent of apples, raisins, and cinnamon began to whisper that Christmas dinner was coming soon.

Unlike folks today who are cautious about contamination, Grandma stuffed her goose rather than bake dressing on the side. She sprinkled the goose with sugar, cinnamon, and crumbs from the stuffing before putting it in the oven. The smell of goose roasting with my Grandma’s stuffing is the smell of Christmas for me. Add to that sweet and sour red cabbage with apples and you have the tastes and odors of Christmas day.

Before Christmas, Grandma baked Pretzel. Her Pretzel was nothing like the pretzels you buy in sacks at the grocery store or the soft pretzels they sell at the mall. It was a sort of plump raisin roll made with her homemade bread dough. She would pat out her dough in a round maybe an inch thick, spread it with butter, raisins, and sugar. Then roll it up like a big cinnamon roll and bring the ends together and cross them. Sprinkle with sugar and bake. Grandma’s Pretzel was a bread and not sweet enough to be called a dessert. She would serve it sliced for breakfast or with coffee. I think it was a variant of German Neujahrsbrezel, New Year’s Pretzel, but Grandma’s was special for Christmas breakfast.

She also baked Springerle cookies and her variant of Lebkuchen. Her Springerles were similar to many recipes you can find. She had the usual carved rolling pin to mold them. They came out, like all good Springerles, hard as stone and strongly flavored with anise. Her Lebkuchen were also flavored with anise and hard, so hard that slamming them down on the table to shatter them into dipping size for dunking in coffee was a good way to avoid cracking a tooth.

She began baking her Lebkuchen early in December. After mixing the very stiff dough, she let it rest to develop flavor for a few days. Then she rolled out the spicy mixture in a thin layer and cut it into two to three-inch squares and rectangles. My mother made them also, but she used Christmas cookie cutters in wreath, star, Santa Claus, and, for me, cowboy shapes. After baking, Grandma frosted them with a hard and shiny powdered sugar glaze. When they were dry, she put them in a crock with a towel on top to age, to soften, in theory, I suppose.

We called them Christmas cookies, not Lebkuchen. There are many variants on Lebkuchen in Germany. Most of them are more like a soft gingerbread than ceramic tile. One variant I know of is Aachener Printen, which are hard like my grandmother’s. Another variant is baked on communion wafers to prevent sticking.

When I was young, I didn’t much care for Christmas cookies. Even the cowboy shaped ones. They were too hard, not very sweet, and I preferred chocolate and caramel to anise and spices. But today? My grandmother’s hard Christmas cookies with coffee on a winter mid-afternoon after throwing down silage and mixing a batch of feed for the cows, or cutting stove logs in the woods, sounds closer to perfection than I will ever approach again.