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February Spring

Winter won’t end for another month, but life is stirring. In Ferndale, if you look carefully, buds are beginning to color and soften everywhere. Spring bulbs are thrusting green leaves out of the ground and in protected places where the sun hits, a bloom here and there adds a bright flash of color to the drab winter foliage.

A bed of snowdropsYesterday, I went out to the farm to check on the progress of awakening life. Snowdrops are showing up all over and have been for a couple weeks now. I missed visiting the farm earlier this season during our snow days, but I will bet the green blades and white flowers of the snowdrops were poking through the snow, justifying their name and adding welcome grace to the scene. Snowdrops are not a native species of the Pacific Northwest. I suspect either my grandmother or my mother planted them around the house. Now, patches of snowdrops show up in the woods and windbreaks, even along Waschke Road. They may be invasive, but I welcome the gentle little flowers and tender leaves that are the first proof of longer days. In a month, they will be almost invisible and forgotten.

My grandson Dario and I saw two deer in the woods. Deer are all over now. I see them in the early morning in Ferndale, dashing between houses and sampling the ornamentals. I suppose people think of them as destructive pests, but when I was growing up, it seemed that everyone in Whatcom County hunted deer. Venison was a change from beef and pork. The animals were a rare sight. Now, the county is so filled with people, hunting almost anywhere in lowland Whatcom is recklessly dangerous and the deer have thrived.

I welcome the graceful and diffident animals and enjoy finding their delicate hoof prints when I’m out walking. When I was growing up, deer never bothered my parents and grandparents’ gardens, but now, fences and deer repellent are required if you mind bites taken from the middle of your best looking pumpkin. Going out to gather the first tender garden salad of the year and finding rows of greens chewed down to the dirt overnight could make a person grind their teeth. I remember once seeing deer chased out of the pasture by milk cows and I wonder if the deer would be scarcer if more cattle were around now.

Sprouting nettlesSpring was certainly progressing in the woods. Tiny, tender nettles were showing. We never ate nettles, but some of the neighbors, I can’t remember who, used to pick tender nettle sprouts in the early spring and cook them into nettle soup. I never tasted their soup; never have I had the slightest desire to taste nettle soup. I know nettles too well from the stings I used to get on my arms and legs while running through the woods where the nettles grew in masses of emerald green, although, when I think of it now, nettles have a sort of refreshing smell. When I was a kid, I heard of old folks rubbing their joints with nettles for their rheumatism. The tiny new ones already have a sting.

Blossoming indian plumThe Indian plums, which my grandpa called “hardhack” along with all other species of pliant, tough, and hard-to-chop shrubs, had unfurled a few tiny leaves and white flowers. Despite the sweet name, the leaves and flowers have a sharp bitter smell when you crush them in your fingers. The floor of the woods was green with deer fern, which is not a sign of spring because deer ferns, unlike bracken or fiddlestick ferns, for which Ferndale was named, are green all year round. They say deer graze Deer fernon deer fern during the winter, but the leaves are tough and leathery. My mother considered deer fern roots a treat. She would dig out the thick roots (rhizomes) brush off the dirt and chew the raw roots. They have a sweet licorice taste. I haven’t tasted a deer fern root in sixty years.

Something to try again.

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Sixteen Geese and Tristram Shandy

Tuesday morning, when Albert, the border collie, and I went out to Gardiner pond, a half inch of rain had already fallen on our rain gauge. The rain did not let up while we walked. We were later than usual; in these dark days, a few minutes after nine is early enough. The pond was high: for two days, off and on, the inflow had exceeded outflow. The shallow brown water was lethargic and bloated, reaching beyond the pond’s border of cattails, which looked sodden and defeated by the gloomy weather.

We spotted four Canada geese huddled on the north side of the island in the center of the pond. Walking past the old birch that had crashed to the ground in the strong southwest wind that blew in before the rain started, we were surprised by an additional dozen geese across the water, sitting and strolling on the south bank. We don’t often see geese out of the water this time of year. As we rounded the west end of the pond, several geese blocked our path. Albert pulled me on. He does not cotton to anserine interruptions on a serious walk. Goose psychology is not an open book, but I guessed their low cackles expressed goosey aggrievement at the intrusion of a determined border collie and his human.

We saw no mergansers, hooded or otherwise; the heron that surveys the pond from the trees on the island was absent, but the usual dozen oblivious, quacking, and dabbling mallards were checked in for the day.

I’ve been following up on an old promise I made to myself years ago: I’m reading Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a confusing book by an Irishman from Clonmel, County Tipperary, who wrote in Yorkshire England about twenty years before the American revolution. The book is considered a novel, although it is hard for me to think that it even resembles novels written today. Some say that Tristram Shandy deeply influenced authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pyncheon, and David Foster Wallace. I have books by all of these authors on my shelves, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to finish any of them, which says more about my limitations than anything else, I suppose. In Sterne’s favor, he was accused by critics, then acquitted by posterity, of plagiarizing from Robert Burton’s meandering and wordy The Anatomy of Melancholy, written about a hundred years prior to Tristram Shandy. The Anatomy is one of my favorites.

Nevertheless, I have enjoyed Tristram Shandy immensely so far, but it’s hard to read. The vocabulary is more recondite than my own. I keep a dictionary at my side. Saying the book rambles is understated inanity. Duh. I’ve gotten near the end of the second volume of nine.

The book begins at the moment of Tristram’s conception, taking the routine of beginning an epic with the birth of a hero to an extreme. At the scene’s climax, Tristram’s mother asks his father if he was forgotten to wind the clock. From that high point, Sterne bumps, doubles back, and twists on toward Tristram’s birth. Some one hundred fifty pages later, his mother is in the pangs of childbirth with a woman midwife in attendance while Tristram’s father Walter, his uncle Toby, and a man-midwife, Dr. Slop, chosen by Tristram’s father and detested by his mother, listen to a sermon that fell out of a technical book on military fortifications, Uncle Toby’s obsessional HOBBY HORSE [Sterne’s caps.] The sermon is read by Uncle Toby’s theatrically inclined servant, Corporal Trim. If you think the names Slop and Trim are salaciously suggestive, I think you are right.

This is either a train wreck or a masterpiece. Oddly, I am finding Tristram Shandy surprisingly relevant to my thoughts in the first month of 2020.

Father, Toby, and Dr. Slop debate a plan for a wind-powered chariot. Piloting a wind-powered vehicle does not require purchasing horses and feeding them. The vehicle is fast and free, but they decide it should not be built because it would threaten the critical trade in horses and fodder. The climate change debate, anyone?

The sermon read while Tristram’s mother suffers could have been written and delivered by Anglican clergyman Sterne himself. Its subject is the co-dependence of moral ethics and religion. The gist is that a morally ethical man without religion is free to act despicably when ethical rules do not prohibit an action. For example, ethically upright bankers may throw widows and orphans out to starve and die on the streets while following the letter of laws and ethical rules. Without religion to question their greedy motives, they feel no compunction to stop.

Conversely, religious people who place religion above morality may steal and murder for profit, but as long as they intend to later repent, which may be years after the profits from their crimes are enjoyed and gone, they remain secure in the good graces of their religion.

I read op-eds and tweets on these subjects every day in 2020.

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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.