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Changes: People, Slugs, and Hawks

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This afternoon, I was out wandering and I started thinking about what has changed and what has stayed the same during the fifty odd years that I have stumbled over the fields and woods of the farm.

The people have changed the most. I grew up surrounded by my great grandmother, grandparents, parents, uncle, aunt, cousins, and my sister. It was a large and close family spread over four houses. I would have been as likely to knock on our own door as I would have been to knock before walking in on my cousins or my grandparents. Now, my sister, parents, uncle, aunt, grandparents, and great grandmother are all dead and my cousins have all moved away. I am unnerved that I don’t even know the names of the people who now live in those houses that I used to walk into freely.

At another outpost on the evolutionary spectrum, the slugs have changed also. The totals in the slug census have not changed, but the species have. When I was small, there were two kinds of slugs: spotted and striped. The spotted variety was most common. Both varieties were smooth skinned.  They were so common in the woods that when I was about ten, my cousins and I would engage in what we thought of as trans-species eugenics and stage slug hunts in which we counted the number of slugs we could disembowel with sticks. The only slightly exaggerated kill tallies on those hunts were often over a hundred each for a half dozen hunters. The victims of this ichorous carnage were almost all spotted.

It’s been dry, so the slugs are in hiding, but I saw a few in the woods this afternoon. They were all of the dark and wrinkled variety that were unknown in the Darwinian salad days of the slug hunt. The wrinkled slugs only began to show up thirty or forty years ago. The spotted variety is now hard to find. Striped slugs are a little more common now than spotted, but the wrinkled species has taken over. This year slugs in general are not especially numerous, but the slug population is cyclic, or dependent on the weather. A couple years ago, the wrinkled slugs were as numerous as the smooth slugs of the slug hunts.

The number of raptors that patrol the skies above the farm has increased for the last thirty years. I remember  hawks circling above the fields when I was in elementary school and at that time, eerie owl hoots and the dark figure of owls sweeping over the fields were commonplace in the summer twilight. Then for the next fifteen or so years into the seventies, I don’t believe I saw a single hawk and the hoots were few. My dad, who was out in fields all the time and most likely to spot a hawk, might mention seeing one a year during that time. In the late seventies, the hawks and owls began to reappear and we began to see eagles occasionally, which dad remembered from his youth. Now scarcely a day goes by that we don’t see several birds of prey, circling, swooping, and diving for mice and the occasional rabbit.

The return of the raptors could be related to the ban on DDT. Among my dad’s friends, some thought banning DDT was nothing but government meddling; others, like my dad, thought that DDT might be useful in other places, but they couldn’t see that DDT really did that much good here and we were probably better off without it. One of the reasons cited for banning DDT was that it was killing off the birds of prey. DDT was banned in 1972 and the hawks had begun to come back by the late seventies. It may be a coincidence, but I am inclined to think that DDT caused the hawks to die off and the ban brought them back.

People change, slugs change, and hawks return.

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Reading and Electronic Editions

From the Vine Maple Studio, I plan to share some of the electronic books that I like in the form that I like to read. Perhaps other readers will enjoy them as much as I do.

Paradoxically, I don’t particularly care for electronic books. I read a lot but seldom watch TV or movies. My tastes in reading range widely and my book collection is varied and in the last decade, it has grown to include many electronic books as well as paper. I am surprised that my electronic books are generally older than those in my paper collection. The oldest literature that I own, if you want to call it literature, is a collection of reproductions of Shang Dynasty c. 1200 BC oracle bone inscriptions that was the text book for a seminar on reading the inscriptions that I took years ago. orac As antiquities, the inscriptions are mildly interesting, tersely chronicling the repeated defeats of the wretched Hsiung Nu and occasionally noting that the king had a toothache. As entertainment, they are barely so-so, but the fact that they are written in characters and language that is closer to modern Chinese than Latin is to French, is astounding. That book is paper, but I have, for example, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which was first published in 1621, in electronic form.

As I said, I prefer paper to electronic books, but electronic books are getting better and they do have advantages. I have a paper copy of Anatomy of Melancholy, the New York Review of Books edition in paper back. It is roughly the size and weight of a large brick and with carpal tunnel, tendinitis, and ulnar nerve entrapment, all souvenirs from years as a computer programmer, anatI have to prop Anatomy on a table to read it comfortably without prescription painkillers, which might enhance William Blake, but not the Anatomy. On the other hand, I can read an electronic edition on my Kindle or PDA without such problems.

The other great advantage to electronic editions is searchability. Computers do a much better and quicker job of skimming 1600 pages of text and finding every occurrence of “black bile” than I can, and when finding every occurrence of black bile is necessary, the electronic edition is a sure winner .

And of course, electronic books are cheaper, sometimes free, and they don’t keep the pulp mills on overtime belching sulfur and chlorine. Also, they are quick. Amazon claims you can get a book on your Kindle in less than a minute, and they come close.

There is no need to discuss the disadvantages of electronic books. Every reader I know, including me, prefers paper when all things are equal. But I will say that electronic readers are improving: the electronic ink display on the Kindle is much easier on the eyes for reading than LCDs or CRTs.  The Kindle display is limited to a gray scale and looks a bit drab, but it uses only reflected light, which is what human eyes have evolved to read; it is a genuine improvement and will very likely continue to improve.

I get many electronic books from Project Gutenberg, the source for my electronic copy of Anatomy Of Melancholy.  Gutenberg is wonderful. They have a large free collection of out-of-copyright books in the public domain that is growing all the time. Project Gutenberg is the reason my electronic books are generally old. Gutenberg makes old books easy to find and free, but I don’t like to read Gutenberg editions directly. I always process the text to suit my exact tastes on whatever display device I happen to be using. That is a perk of being both a reader and a programmer and one that might also benefit the readers of this site.

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Visiting the Ocean Beaches

Rebecca and I went to Moclips on the Pacific Ocean side of the Olympic Peninsula last weekend. I enjoy the ocean beaches but my parents and grandparents, who lived on the same farm we do, never showed any interest in the ocean. Bellingham Bay and Georgia Straits were enough for them. FoggyBeach

They may have been too busy. City dwellers may fantasize that farming is a relaxed, low-pressure life, but that is not the way I saw it. On a small farm, especially a dairy farm, it’s up at dawn and work until after dark, seven days a week, three hundred sixty five days a year. And the work fills every available minute. When my father took a day off, he had to choose which jobs that had to be done would go undone and he had to cope with the risk that something serious would go wrong in his absence. He often envied neighbors who he saw leaving for work in town when he was shoveling manure after morning milking. And we would see those same neighbors coming home while he was getting ready for evening milking.

A psychiatrist once told me that in Whatcom County, his most severely depressed patients were dairy farmers and he considered dairy farming, especially small family operations, to be a psychologically dangerous, even life-threatening, occupation. The rate of accidental death among owner-operator farmers is high, and from talking with his patients, he wondered how many of those accidents were actually suicides.

That view seems extreme to me but there is an element of truth. A farmer is at the mercy of the commodities markets, the banks, the weather, the health of his herd, and a thousand other things over which he has only minimal control. The work itself is often mind-numbingly boring and physically taxing. Every dairy farmer lives with the look, smell and even taste of bovine feces. By 50 all farmers have some form of arthritis and carpal tunnel is rampant. Most are injured often enough and severely enough to have missing or non-functioning body parts. Among my father’s farming friends, I remember three suicides, and that seems like a lot to me, because I can’t think of a single suicide among my friends.Pig barn
On the other hand, given all the drawbacks, there are some who like it. I think my Dad genuinely enjoyed working with the cows, and sometimes, even I have to agree with him: shoveling manure is unpleasant in a way that is preferable to the tone of some corporate meetings, and a mouthful of a manure dipped cow tail tastes better than what left in the pit of your stomach when you lay off a good employee because corporate mandated a ten per cent reduction in force. There is good and bad in everything.

I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time after I had seen the Atlantic. Only after I had gone to college on the shore of Lake Michigan and seen the Atlantic from New York and Boston, and only at Rebecca’s urging, did I ever go to see the Pacific. Since then, I still wait for my fill of the wide Pacific Ocean beaches of the Washington and Oregon coasts. My ancestors carefully kept woodlots and windbreaks all around the farm yard, so I have always lived in a clearing in the woods. A hundred yards in any direction and its a wall of trees. The ocean is a new world to me. Bursting out from the firs and cedars of the coastal forests, I see those wide wide breakers rolling that wash away my sopping cow tails and corporate meetings, and I could stay there forever, out of places and times and watching the waves.