Annie's Western Adventure

Annie's Western Adventure

There is so much going on in the news -- the economic crisis, bailouts, a new president, a stylish first lady, and even the academy awards. It all makes me feel as if I should address something important, something newsworthy here. But then there's the escapist in me. One morning, just a week or two ago, I actually said, "Shut up" out loud to the radio as I was getting dressed and heard another dismal report of cutbacks, layoffs, greed, falling stock prices, and economic drear delivered on NPR news. So something small, personal, and close to home might make me (and you!) feel more secure for a minute. The topic this time will be my cat, Annie. Maybe we'll get back to the wider world, and our serious problems next time.

Annie is my independent, in-charge alpha cat. She's a calico I adopted 5 or 6 years ago. Annie is the kind of cat who loves people to pet her, but hates to be held. She's curious, bold, acts like she's the biggest, baddest cat in the land, and harasses Sugar, my Himalayan (who has never fully recovered from Annie's arrival in our household). But when it comes right down to it, Annie is a little cat and a big chicken. I'll never forget the way she screamed and cried, "Help. Murder. My world's falling apart!" when we moved to the house in St. Anne's Hill in Dayton. I had to wrap her in a blanket and carry her to the house, screaming all the way. All the stray cats in the neighborhood came out of the bushes to see what the trouble was. I'm sure they, and all my new neighbors there thought a cat was being skinned alive, from the sound of it.

But let's get back to Utah, and the present. In this little friendly town, a neighbor made a sweet snack after dinner one night, and brought me a sample. While I was accepting this gift, and chit-chatting at the door, Annie must have slipped out the door at my feet.

Annie has always yearned to be an outdoor cat. I never let her out when we lived in the city. But last Fall, she found a way out of the house several times, and started training me to be the owner of a cat that is both an outdoor and an indoor cat. But since the the snow started falling here, she had not ventured out.

Annie often wanders the house. So I didn't notice she was gone until the next night. I was thinking about going to bed and the cats usually gather 'round at that time. I noticed that I hadn't seen Annie for quite a while. When I started calling all over the house, Sugar, the Himalayan, hunkered down and looked slightly guilty. Then I went to the front door and called out to the dark valley and the bright stars. No luck. I spent a restless night, imagining Annie's frozen little body somewhere out there in the wilds of northern Utah. I got up several times that night and called for her.

In the morning, I went out searching again. The neighbor's lambs were startled at my shameless calling, and stood absolutely still, on edge, the way lambs do. The neighbor's sheep-herding Border Collie came over and looked at me nervously. By this time, Annie had been out in the cold for 36 hours.

When I got to work that morning, I called my wonderful neighbor, May. The first time May came over to visit, she was surprised that I brought cats with me all the way from Ohio (cats are barn animals here, and they're all at least half stray). But May was concerned. She could hear panic in my voice. I'm sure her sympathy was based in an undersanding that I had misplaced one of my 2 only companions. She said she'd send her husband, Myron, out to the barn to see if Annie had joined their cat pile. She also said she would call the other neighbors, put out an APB for a wandering Eastern calico house cat.

I didn't hear back from May that day. So I knew Annie was still at large. I "sang the blues" to the receptionist at work, who is something of a bartender behind that counter. I talked about how sad it is when a small pet dies. I thought about all the cats I've buried in the back yard, usually in the pouring rain or the bitter cold.

When I got home that night, I went out cat-hunting again. Just after dark, I passed a small open field not far from the house, still calling "Annie," and I heard a distant "meow."
"Annie is that you?"
"meow."

I could make out the shape of a car sitting in the field, and I thought I could see something moving on its hood. So I ventured into the snowy field. I didn't have boots on. But the snow was crusty enough that I mostly walked on top of it.

As I got close to the car, I saw that it was, in fact, long-lost Annie. She wouldn't leave the car to come to me, but paced back and forth, and jumped into my arms as I walked up close to the car. I noticed that the windshield was caved in, and there was still a little trailer hitched to it. Hmm. Had Annie been on a camping trip?

The getaway car (with footprints):


Annie was warmer than I was at that point. She seemed more cuddly than usual as I walked home with her. I guess she had been hiding in that old car for a couple of days. But the car wasn't really that far from the house. Was she just reluctant to put her feet back in the cold snow, since she had found the oasis? Was she lost, disoriented? Didn't she know her way home? Was she having a mid-winter cat party there? Was this her trusty steed, and was she playing Annie Oakley? I don't know. But as we approached the front door of my house, and I opened it, she got excited and bolted out of my arms. I corralled her into the house.

Annie immediately started rolling on the carpet. Sugar, the Himalayan, hissed and growled when Annie rolled near her, as if to say "You're back, darnit. I thought I was going to have this place all to myself. Keep your distance, and next time take a longer trip." And I thought that she had been upset about Annie's absence!

That was 3 weeks ago. Annie, now known as "Oakley," hasn't been outside since then. But the ice is starting to melt on the fish pond. Melting snow and icicles are dripping from the garage roof. I see lots of migrating ducks and geese in the morning as I pass the reservoir on my way to work. And I guarantee that Annie is plotting her next adventure.



Now, don't we feel better?

So Much Depends Upon...

I went for a walk the other morning and came across this old half of a GMC truck in a field south of my house. It struck me as an appropriate image about where GMC (General Motors Corporation) is today. I thought my friends in Ohio might appreciate the wry humor in it, since we've suffered from General Motor's cutbacks, which have taken the ooomph out of many "rust belt" communities. The part I like best in the picture is the coiled barbed wire sticking out. That piece of steel on the ground is pretty symbolic too. Something about it says, "John Henry was here."

John Henry, a symbol of the strong worker in America's age of industry, was, in the end, a story about the futility of people fighting the advance of technology. The story says that in order to save people's jobs, John Henry took on a contest with a machine to try to prove that people could do the job of clearing land and drilling tunnels for the railroad faster than the new machine. He won the contest with a heroic, super-human effort, but dropped dead from exhaustion when it was over. So that's a sad story. But by now we all know that brains have eclipsed brawn in America. The machines have won the contest.

The red GMC truck in the picture is out there in a big field. I don't see any buyers or easy bailouts on the horizon. It looks like a pretty old GMC truck, judging by the stylized logo, the rusty steel bumper and all. In an effort to try to date this red truck, I did some research and found out that GMC "Ducks" were used in WWII, and that they were driven in the Korean war, too. Here is the original logo, from 1911, which is more like the one on the truck in the field than the current block style logo:


Here's a closer look at the logo (and the flaking paint and the rust) on the red truck in the field:


GMC made mostly big trucks until about 1944. By 1961, they were using the current block-style logo. I found a logo like the one on the red truck on trucks that were manufactured in 1944 and 1956. So I the truck in the field was made sometime between 1944 and 1956, and most certainly before 1960. That means it has been around for about as long as I have. Uh-oh. Am I obsolete, rusty, stuck in out in a field somewhere without an engine too?

I wonder what happened to the engine and the cab - this GMC truck isn't going anywhere, unless they hitch it to a horse or a tractor. That's probably what they do, because the tires still look pretty good. It even has a spare. Just to make sure you can see that it is missing its front half, here's another angle on it:


So the era of the big automobile manufacturers in America is over. I suppose a company can only prosper for a limited period of time, before it becomes top-heavy and bloated or outlives its usefulness. I looked at an 1850 census once and was amazed at the number of jobs that don't exist anymore -- blacksmith, miller, coppersmith. So we have to keep evolving. There are 11.1 million unemployed Americans who can attest to that.

The problems of automakers are as deep as they are wide. Some of these troubles are related to the credit freeze. But General Motors lost 38.7 billion in 2007 and another $21.2 billion in 2008. And most of that happened before the credit freeze.

In France, no one is buying cars either. The government has put together a bailout package there because in France 10% of the workforce works for automakers like Renault and Peugeot-Citroen. Car sales are down in Indonesia, too.

Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors are looking for low interest federal loans. Chrysler received a $4 billion loan from the US Treasury and wants $3 billion more. Ford has asked for $9 billion line of credit. GM received $4 billion on December 31st, which kept it from defaulting on payments due to its suppliers. And GM received another $5.4 billion last week.

There's been a lively debate going on across America about whether the car companies should be allowed to fail or not. On one hand, allowing them to fail will really hurt the US economy. Unemployment figures from November for some Ohio and Michigan cities that rely heavily on the auto industry prove that: Flint MI had 11.6% unemployment, Detroit had 9.5%, Toledo had 9.2%, and Dayton had 7.5%. For the sake of comparison, here in Logan, Utah the unemployment rate for November was 2.4%.

On the other hand, why should we subsidize corporations that have irresponsible or misguided business practices? In discussing the financial industry bailout, Dennis Kucinich, a liberal senator from Ohio said, "This is a massive transfer of wealth - taking dollars out of taxpayers pockets and putting it in the banks."

I don't think there's much debate over the need for the US Treasury to put stipulations on the way the automakers use any loans they receive. But the US Treasury doesn't know much about making or selling cars. So there are limits to that strategy.

Naturally, strong companies survive and weak ones die. But do we want natural principles to prevail when the failure of US automakers could drag the whole country down? The Chrysler bailout of the 1980's was successful. So it seems to me that we should give it a try, or at least do something to help the companies, workers, and communities gain a little time to adjust to failure.

I can remember the opening of the new GM truck plant in Dayton, Ohio in the early 1980's. I toured it then, and it was like a buzzing city inside those walls. There were fire engines in there, and robots getting parts off the shelves behind wire mesh partitions, and an automated assembly line where the right fender dropped down out of the ceiling at the perfect time to meet the body of the car and the welder's torch. It was a spectacle and something of an engineering miracle.

My sister just bought a Honda Fit, which is a highly recommended little car, made for today's driver and last year's gas prices. I drive a Mazda. So how can I lament the demise of the US automakers? If I was going to buy a truck today, I think I'd buy one that was made in the US. But US automakers DO know how to make trucks. Which brings up another factor in this complex issue. If we want the US automakers to survive, I guess we need to think more seriously about buying their products, just as they need to think more seriously about making products that we want to buy.

In the end, I suppose all I can do is offer my photo at the top of the page, which sort of says it all. Maybe GM could use it for an advertising campaign with emotional/nostalgic appeal! Would you buy a vehicle from a company that made a truck more than 50 years ago that has lost its engine but is still sitting out in a field somewhere in Utah holding barbed wire and some sort of farm implement? Well, I guess not. Time marches on. But here's my last word on the subject (with apologies to William Carlos Williams):

so much depends
upon

a red
truck

glazed with
rust

in the white
snow-covered field

Spacious Skies

It's Sunday afternoon and I just finished watching the inaugural concert that took place in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. What a terrific moment in American history! I was watching most of it with the warm sunlight streaming in my picture window and tears streaming down my face. Hope is a wonderful thing.

We've been in need of hope. Looking back over the last 10 years or so, when I think about Washington DC, I see Clinton-Lewinsky, Newt Gingrich, 911 crashes, Abu Ghraib Prison, waterboarding debates, even a Vice-President shooting his friend in a hunting accident. One thing is sure: it has been a long time since we had a government that was responsive to its people. A new government, one with strength and an optimistic vision, is reason to celebrate and to hope.

I haven't read Obama's book, so I don't know exactly what he meant by "The Audacity of Hope." But I don't think hope is audacious. I think it's as necessary as the air we breathe. Without it, we have boredom or fear, and despair, eventually.

Until I watched the concert, I didn't realize how divided, afraid, and alone we've become as a people. The theme of he concert was "We Are One," and the performers said it frequently. Sheryl Crow, Herbie Hancock, Pete Seeger, Beyonce, Shakira, Bono, Stevie Wonder, Garth Brooks, John Mellencamp, ("the voice of ornery America"!), a subdued Tiger Woods, Queen Latifah, James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, and Renee Fleming all appeared. There were quotes from Dwight D Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lincoln, JF Kennedy, pictures of working people all across the country, information about the establishment of our great national parks, a little history about racial discrimination, a tribute to service people, and young choirs were backing it all up. A lot of the singers in the backup choirs were young African Americans, which was another good reason to be moved to tears. They have a chance now. I remember racial discrimination and hatred, the fight over desegregation and school bombings, the march in Selma Alabama, KKK cross burnings. Over the last 40 years, we have overcome.

If you get this message today, and didn't see the concert live, you might want to watch one of the rebroadcasts at 7 and 11:30 tonight, on HBO. It will be available to all cable subscribers, even those who don't normally get HBO.

One of the things that impressed me about the concert was the number of truly inspired songs that have been written over the years. So I thought I'd retitle a little poem (my version of a song, I suppose) that I wrote last week, and offer it here. It's sorta simple and humble, about my little corner of the world. Maybe that's fittin. My country. O Beautiful for...

Spacious Skies

A big white moon walks
the fields between the
eastern Rocky canyons
and the Wellsville mountains
to the west tonight. A January moon,
as big as we'll have all year,
turns its face to the Mormons
who count their fair,
freckled children,
turns a light on the frosted universe,
turns itself into the sea of snow fields,
calls to the lost owls
from its alien bronze halo,
and inches toward its destination:
a dip behind Chocolate Peak
to free the soft blue sky
as pink light
touches frothy clouds
crowded into
creased slopes,
and shines into
my open heart.

After I wrote this, I had to go get an ice cream sundae, which actually looked just like a miniature version of the snow-covered Chocolate Peak, with whipped cream clouds snuggled into it. All that envisioning of snow and mountains led me right to the important stuff -- ice cream. Seriously, I love this place and its snowy mountains and fields, it's spacious sky and moons and vistas, the bright stars so far and the clouds that come so close. Every night when I drive back into the land that is only partially tamed, about 3 or 4 miles from my town, I become sort of baffled by the sea of snow. It hasn't really snowed for more than a week now, although plenty of it has accumulated and there is frosty fog in the mornings. But I'm impatiently waiting for the next real snow.

Let's hope the inauguration and the Obama presidency will clear off the fog that has overtaken this country, and bring inspiration and renewal to the American people and the world. I'm confident that we will have hope again, at least for a little while. I'm even more confident (and almost flabergasted) to realize that we live in a country that really means it when it says it stands for liberty and justice for all.

The Frost is All Over

This is a picture I took on my way into work last week. The tree is rather ghostly, don't you think?

Below is another frosty picture I took the other day.



Going north from my little town, out into the wide open spaces, I ran into the following landscape. You can just barley see the mountain in the distance because there is snow in the air.



So the frost is all over. And I'm humming an Irish traditional jig called "The Frost is All Over." That's a strange name for a song, don't you think?

For quite a few years, I've been intrigued by the titles of Irish tunes. Many of them refer to love, people, and places. And I think the Irish have more than their share of drinking songs. But many tune names are very unusual. Here are a few:

-Merrily Kiss the Quaker
-Bag of Spuds
-Ladies' Pantalettes
-The Rambling Pitchfork
-Come up the Stairs with Me
-Indian Ate the Woodchuck
-Jack Gilder's Beard
-Oh Dear Mother My Toes Are Sore
-The Cat That Ate The Candle
-Pull Out the Knife and Stick it in Again

I think part of the reason the titles are so strange is because there are so many different (but similar) tunes. The Session, a very good Irish music website, has 8231 tunes on it. The classic Irish music reference, O'Neill's Dance Tunes of Ireland, has 1001 tunes in it. With so many tunes to name, I guess you'd eventually run out of ordinary names.

To play Irish music in a session with other people, you need to know lots of tunes. Irish musicians don't use sheet music -- it slows people down when they play, and much of the music is made for dancing. Irish musicians call people who read music "paper trained." Doug, my Irish musician friend and teacher, says that the tune names are designed to be memorable just so that the tunes, themselves, will be easier to remember.

Irish music is rooted in the stories and lives of the people. That's reflected in the titles. After being invaded by England, the Irish were forbidden to speak their own language, so music was used to remember or relay some of the important events. Of course, it was also a way to keep their heritage intact. So that may be why music is such an important part of the Irish culture.

Some people think all Irish tunes sound alike. If you have thousands of tunes, and 8 notes in a scale, and just 8 or 10 different rhythms/structures (jigs, reels, marches, polkas, slipjigs, hornpipes, mazurkas, srathspeys, waltzes), how different can the songs be? Is there a mathematician out there who could offer a solution to that problem? One thing is for sure -- the Irish keep the music interesting by the textures they create when they combine different instruments -- harps, fiddles, flutes, whistles, accordions, pipes, guitars, banjos, bouzoukis, mandolins...

Here are a couple of samples of The Frost is All Over:
http://www.imeem.com/groups/Leem07Ir,boanns_clan//music/sUV8tspH/boanns_clan_the_frost_is_all_over/

http://www.audiosparx.com/sa/archive/Christmas/Christmas-Vocals/The-Frost-is-All-Over/270772

The tune is fast (the way frost comes and goes) and has a cold feeling to it. But other than that, I can't figure where the title came from. Is there something crystalline about its structure? Did it have words at one time that talked about the frost and snow? My guess is that it was probably just the weather report that day.

Now that Christmas is all over, I hope everyone's resting, recovering from the festivities. I made it back to Ohio, where the Frost is NOT all over. It was 70 degrees yesterday!

Part 8 - Snow

It has finally started snowing here. And now it won’t stop. There are about 5 or 6 inches of it on the ground. It has snowed every day since Saturday, just a little bit each day. It’s now Tuesday. And the forecast calls for snow through the weekend.

It’s a white white white world! White sky, white fields, white mountains, and only a few fence posts and tall grasses to break it up.

On my way to work this morning, I saw a horse standing absolutely still next to a frozen tree (looking cold, miserable, almost afraid to move). That was a black and white world. After driving for 7 or 8 miles, I approached a traffic light and saw the little spot of green as the first color of the day, and something of a shock after all that white.

So I thought I’d post a few pictures, which I took at the beginning of this episode of snow, as well as a couple of random thoughts and questions about snow. I hope this will help you warmer climate folks feel Christmas-y (or, more likely, lucky to be warm).



There’s a minor avalanche on my metal roof. Avalanches are real here, not just something in the cartoons or movies that play with the imaginations of children, who are so intrigued by natural dangers. There is an avalanche hotline here. People take helicopters into the back country to ski, which is part of the reason we need the hot line. As soon as it started snowing, I saw snowmobiles on trailers behind SUVs and pickups headed for the canyons, too.

The ski resorts drop explosives into the snow where they think there’s a danger of avalanche, so that it happens before the skiers get there. The snow is beautiful AND dangerous. A woman died in an avalanche at the Snowbird ski resort on Sunday. Her sister was quoted as saying, “We are a skiing family and we’ll still be a skiing family.” They said that the woman who died was “an extremist.” But I don’t know. Is it extreme to hike 20 minutes with your skis in order to see the snow in the real wilderness? That doesn't seem extreme to me.

I’ve been singing with a little community Christmas choir. One of the songs we’re singing is Still, Still, Still (of German origin, something like a lullaby if you don't know it). It says, “You can hear the falling snow.” Have you ever heard the falling snow? I haven't. I guess you hear the snow just because of what you don’t hear. So is that hearing or not hearing?

I'm reminded of one of the first short stories that ever caught my attention – Silent Snow, Secret Snow, by Conrad Aiken. Have you read it? It was in the standard English curriculum when I was in junior high school, and I've seen it in more recently published readers. The critics say the story is about a kid’s descent into schizophrenia. He imagines that snow is getting deeper and deeper when he wakes up and hears the footsteps of the postman getting increasingly muffled each day. I don't know about the schizophrenia thing. I bet there’s not a kid alive (in northern climates, anyway) who hasn’t spent time imagining that it has snowed, as s/he wakes up. I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night as a grownup and gone to window and been fooled by a white street light or the moon shining down on pavement, making it look like it has snowed. I think the Aiken story tries to capture a kid’s interior world, and the natural isolation of being a child. But all this may not mean much to you if you haven't read the story. It's fun to think about kids waking up to new snow, though. Kids and snow go together. Snow still makes me feel like a kid.

"Snow” is a perfect word, isn't it? Soft and slippery and hushed … and it happens right NOW. Under normal circumstances, it might be gone tomorrow. But they say I won’t see the ground here until April.



I spotted snow falling at night against the backdrop of the log section of my cabin and thought it was incredibly beautiful. I’m not sure why. Was it an opening scene from a nice movie I can’t quite remember? Maybe it’s just the contrast of light, random flakes moving against large, solid, dark logs. I think snow on the wood pile is pretty too. But I might change my mind about that when I try to light a fire.

So the snow has fallen, and is falling, and we’re all getting ready for Christmas, and we'll probably hear the familiar story of something coming down from heaven, a transformed world, softness, animals, straw, and difficult journeys. It comes at just the right time.





I hope you get to see or hear something wonderful this Christmas.

Part 7 - Pioneering

Utah Adventure Part 7 - Pioneering



I went all the way to Connecticut for Thanksgiving. It was great to see family, and to be in a place where I had absolutely no work to do. I noticed dramatic differences between New England and the West. One day, I drove from Glastonbury to Cromwell (just 2 towns over), which involved 4 or 5 highways, cloverleafs, wall to wall cars, and 2 or 3 “I’m lost” phone calls before I managed to get there and back. I was surprised by all the roads and cars, since I’m accustomed now to wide open spaces and a life with just a few places to go.

Here in Northern Utah, there are really only 2 places to go – Idaho or Temple Square. People go to Idaho (Preston, where Napoleon Dynamite was filmed, is just 19 miles north of here) probably to buy lottery tickets and full-strength beer. They go to Temple Square in Salt Lake City to see the lights at Christmas time.

Here, at night, I sometimes wonder how long it might be before another motorist would come along if my car broke down on the road. On the way back from the airport at 1 am on the Monday after Thanksgiving, I think I was the only person on the road from Brigham City all the way home (30 miles or so). But, oh, the stars! You can see heart-stopping stillness there. You can see lots of activity and movement in the night sky, too, if you look at it long enough. I'm not sure which is more curious and arresting, really.

Oh. There’s one other place to go from here – Bear Lake, which is a good-sized lake (takes an hour to drive around it), in the far northwest corner of the state, near the Wyoming and Idaho borders. It is about 45 minutes from Logan, on a winding canyon road that follows and cris-crosses the Logan River the whole way. I suppose it is an alpine lake. It is a resort community out there, a mini mini Jackson Hole. There is a little ski resort there that the local people use. I drove there last weekend, talked to one hyperactive guy (too much time alone?) with a strange headband attending to a gas station/market/western store, and noticed that everything seemed shut down for the winter. I didn't see much there, besides this sweet group of big ole turkeys by the side of the road:



Here’s a picture of the lake. It’s hard to see it because of the cloud rising from its surface (due to the change in temperature as the sun dipped behind the mountains, I suppose, which also makes pink light reflect from the lake).


So I’ll include a picture I took of the lake last summer, when I first came here to interview, which seems like a lifetime ago now:


Here’s a view of the canyon just south of Bear Lake. The shadow of the mountains on the land make for nice contrast, I think. And look at how far above the clouds we are:


I saw a ragged red fox making his way down to the lake. And I felt like something of a pioneer, just me, animals, and a dramatic landscape.

They talk about the pioneers alot around here. I already know of 4 cities that have "Pioneer" parks. There’s a Daughters of the Utah Pioneers organization. And the 24th of July is an official state holiday -- it commemorates the day the pioneers arrived in Utah. So I’ve been thinking about what the pioneer spirit really is. New Englanders were pioneers when they landed and built the colonies. There’s still a rugged independence there, but I’m not sure it is the same spirit the western pioneers have.

I guess the pioneer spirit involves taking risks, going to new places, opening up, and being tough enough to survive under harsh, uncivilized conditions. It’s not really about independence and individualism, like the New England spirit. It’s about pitching in, relying on each other, each person offering what they can to the community, which is a necessity if you’re going to survive. I think a big part of the pioneer spirit here is living with Nature, not conquering it.

Here's a somewhat unrefined example of living with Nature. They don't dispose of dead skunks in the road in Utah. It’s a practical issue -- who wants that job? You’d ruin a lot of shovels that way! And if you let a dead skunk sit there in the road, it will eventually dry up and stop stinking. I have to say that someone still needs to prove that to me -- there’s one spot on the way to work that has smelled like fresh skunk, ripe skunk, and now overripe skunk, over the course of the last 5 weeks! Are you having an imaginary unpleasant olifactory experience yet?

There’s also more than a little self-sufficiency mixed into the pioneer spirit. The LDS(Mormon) Church teaches that every family should have a year’s supply of food on hand, just in case hard times come along (not Armageddon – I asked about that). So a food storage area is a big part of every household. In the grocery stores, you can buy huge cans of dried mushrooms, cereal, blueberries, etc. Of course, people do a lot of their own canning – even dried beans!

I never dreamed that I’d ever compare myself to Eva Gabor in her role in the
Green Acres show. But I’ve thought of her several times in the last month – when I spent several hours dealing with a cord of firewood that a guy in bib overalls with a long curly beard dumped in a big pile behind my garage; when I bought mousetraps and considered the possibility of having to dispose of a trapped mouse (and decided not to set them just yet); when the "honey wagon" passes my house, dripping, on its way to fertilize the fields to the west; every time I wonder if the overhead flapping I sense sometimes when I open my front door at night is a bird or a bat. Where is that Eddie Albert when you need him?

I was talking to a group of women after the community choir practice last Sunday night about how to keep warm, about the bread they all make every week, and about canning food, and they said “We’ll make a pioneer out of you yet!” So they must think I have potential. Maybe it's because I left my diamonds at home. Dunno, though. I might have to buy a fur or two before Winter’s over.

Part 6 - Wild Life

Utah Adventure Part 6 - Wild Life

I was sitting in my living room one night last week, minding my own business, when I realized that there was some back-and-forth hooting going on outside. I wondered if it was the sound of dogs barking in the distance. Coyotes? I shut off my noise-maker of a TV, and then realized that it was the voices of owls overhead. There were 2 distinct calls or voices -- one lower than the other. I wasn't sure if they were on my roof or in the big cottonwood tree out front. So I turned off all the lights and went to the upstairs windows to see if I could spot them. No luck. I listened for a while (it was a lively converation), then went outside to see if I could find them, and scared them into silence.

I went straight to my computer to see if I could figure out what type of owls they were. I found out that Utah has Burrowing Owls that migrate in November, and also a variety called the Mexican Spotted Owl. And I listened to the voices of owls around the world and was amazed at the variety of sounds owls make, and the diversity of the species ... from Madagascar to Australia to Brazil to northern Utah ... screeching, hooting, squeaking, whistling, cooing. Fun! But how does a person get to see them, since they're active at night?!

I took a trip to the Bear River Migrating Bird Refuge in Brigham City (about 25 miles South of Logan) on Saturday. The interpretive center was small and specific to water birds. But a volunteer in the gift shop told me that my owls might have been "short-eared" owls (as opposed to "great horned" I suppose). It was a modern little museum building made of local stacked stone, with one park ranger who was on the phone with her babysitter, but motioned for me to sign up for their emailings.

The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge is managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The Bear River runs through the middle of the refuge, and eventually runs into the Salt Lake just south of there. They say that the Refuge, with its fresh water ponds and canals, is one of the most important resting areas for migrating waterfowl in North America. In spring and summer, it is a nesting place for birds like western grebes, American avocet, Wilson's phalarope, black-necked stilt, snowy egret, and white-faced ibis. Most of it is closed to the public -- it really IS for protecting wildlife, not just a place for us to go see the birds.

From the museum/interpretive center, I drove about 10 miles to get to the beginning of a 12-mile loop road through the Refuge. There were only a handful of cars on that road -- I saw only 3 or 4 in 12 miles. I saw mostly water and mountains reflected in the water, and sky ... and a few duck hunters dressed in camouflage pulling their flat-bottomed boats (one was named "Fowl Play") out of the river. Some of the road was paved, some was gravel, and some was dirt. My van now looks like an off-road vehicle, covered in dust and splattered.

There weren't any bears in the river. And there weren't many birds flying or swimming close by, where I could really see them, either. I suppose most of them have migrated by this time of year.



But the volunteer at the interpretive center had said "I have 14,000 migrating swans in areas A and D. But you probably can't get to them." So I was on the lookout. I did see them from a distance of about a mile, through my binoculars (Ohio binoculars, under-powered for this place where you can see so far). The thousands of swans looked like a plump undulating ribbon of white on the shore of a pond that was far off the road. The path that went in that direction (for hikers or for maintenance, I imagine) was gated too.

If the duck hunters can put their boats in the water, I guess this Ohio "migrating bird" can bring her canoe back in the Spring and have a whole day of being amazed by the light and the reflections of the mountains and sky in the water. I'll look forward to that! Here's a glimpse:



I wonder if a bird refuge isn't something of an Indian reservation for birds. Has the White man taken the good land and given land that they can't easily use to the birds? Maybe so. But I guess that's better than just plundering through and ignoring the needs of all the other creatures.

If anyone is still wondering if I was just storytelling about the seagulls in Utah, here's proof. I spotted these 2 at Bear River:



With the Thanksgiving holiday in sight, I'd just like to say that I'm thankful for lots of things, including of you all who care enough about me to read this. Since I'm a stranger in a strange land, this year, I'm really glad to have nice neighbors:
- like the ones who used their riding mower to mulch my leaves last week
- like the owls who were calling to each other over my head
- like the people (starting with Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, I suppose) who set aside places for birds, other animals, and plants so that we can see and love them and rest for a little while in the sacred wild places.

What nice parts of life are YOU thinking about this Thanksgiving?

Good night (from the Bear River Migrating Bird Refuge):