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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.

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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.