Strange Harvest in the Valley…

The garden is finished, done, harvested and laid away for the “short white days.” Cabbage soured into kraut, packed in jars and stored in the pantry. The quince picked and stewing in jars of cinnamon clove syrup. And this year’s honey crop bottled and ready for the honey customers. But there’s one more crop to harvest, and a rather strange crop at that: mason bees. It’s my first bee harvest and I’m excited. Last spring I watched the females make trip after trip to the little bee block house on the shed. The stocky little gals, each pollen-bellied, had chosen their own little tube cave as home for their young. What a wonderful waste of time watching them come and go, making a little game of their activity: counting the seconds between trips; counting the seconds each spent in her tube, noting her headfirst entry, a quick exit, and then reentering in reverse—each trip a heads and tails operation.

As their nesting cycle waned (late March to June), I counted the tubes as they were plugged. After Ms. Mason packed in the pollen stores, and laid an egg beside the golden protein pill, she packed the whole compartment tight with a mud plug—thus the "mason” in the bee. (Unlike the human Order of Freemasonry, a fraternal organization, the masonry tasks of the insect Mason fall upon the female; a mason bee block is thus a sorority house—hard working females bringing in the bacon, laying the eggs, and hauling the “mud” to seal things up.) She would repeat the procedure as many as nine times, nine compartments per tube before sealing the entrance.

It was a fitful spring, not fit for man, beast, or bug, and my bee block closed the season with a meager six of its thirty tubes plugged. Not a very promising crop.I turned the block around to prevent birds from tapping into a bee smorgasbord (or would that be a smorgasblock?) and waited until fall. 

Today’s the day. If you weren’t an optimist, you would shed your hands of farmin’—of any kind. I have six sealed tubes, for sure, a potential of fifty-four cocoons, a nearly five fold return on my capital investment of  the twelve cocoons I “planted” in the bee box attic last April. I take the block inside and eagerly begin the harvest .

Two bands of electrical tape hold the plastic layers in place. These I cut to release the layers so I can pry them apart to examine the contents. The plastic sections are colored to help orient each bee to her own tube. (Sometimes a lady gets confused, enters the wrong tunnel, and is quickly ejected by the rightful proprietor.)

I break apart the plastic layers one color at a time and unroll the newspaper inserts I installed last spring. These paper liners encourage the little masons to nest in plastic—their natural nesting sites are wood—and allow them a better purchase when they are working within. The newsprint also draws the moisture away from the cocoons.What a mess! And what an even greater disappointment: insert after insert is empty! The six plugged tubes are the only ones with contents. And in these the predators have been at work: pollen mites have intruded, eating the bee larva’s food, leaving the larva to starve; parasitic wasps have laid their eggs on other larvae, as well, and their larvae in turn consumed the bee larvae. It is a meager harvest I extract from the five plastic layers.By the time I pick through the pollen dust, frass, mud pellets and shards of newspaper, only twenty-one cocoons are salvageable, less than half of my projections--certainly a mockery of the block’s potential.

To remove the debris from the little pellets, I soak them in cold bleach water for fifteen minutes. After their bath I put the cocoons in a sieve, rinse them well, and let them dry for the rest of the day.

In the evening I gather up my scanty harvest and deposit the cocoons in a plastic bottle. After convincing the wife the little pellets have nothing to do with rats, I tuck the bottle away in the kitchen refrigerator behind the horseradish spread where it will remain until next March. Then I’ll install them in the bee box attic and the cycle will begin again. Am I optimistic about next year’s crop of masons? Well, remember…in the spring, you just get new hope!

The Greening of the Lawn…

You’d think after Monday’s record breaking one and a half inches of rain, the lawn would green up nicely. Fact is, that gully washer only made things less green. Strange that this time of year the lawn can green up by day, but come daybreak the next, the green is nowhere to be found. Yes, the annual “leaf” battle royal is in full contest these days. The big backyard maple is shedding its summer foliage, spewing its leafy attire as indifferently as it donned it last spring. Of course it’s this annual process that gives the season its name: Fall. I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary regarding the origins of the word in reference to a season. The OED records the earliest occurrence of “fall” used in the context of a season of the year as 1545 a.d. (OED, Compact Edition, p. 953. ): “Spring tyme, Somer, faule of leaf, and winter.”

Yes, it’s “faule of leaf” I’m complaining about here. Actually not so much the fall—gravity grips us all—the resulting cover-up is the problem. You can’t let a tree load of leaves smother the lawn in the winter. Bad things will happen, would happen, I’m sure—although I’m puzzled as to the nature of the consequences. If the leaves are wet and matted, which is usually the case, it’s out with the rake and the scraping begins, continues, until the fiery, downed foliage is piled up and hauled away and the green beneath is visible again. Dry leaves I deal with the lazy man’s way: mulched up and vacuumed into the power mower’s bagger. This fall, I’ve been lucky so far: only one session with the wheelbarrow and rake.

Just as the unfurling of spring buds takes times, so does the shedding of the adults. It would be nice if the task were not so prolonged; if the branches and twigs would release their charges all at once; if the flow of sap ceased instantly at the tap; if the grand old maple shed its raiment in one grand cascade of color. But no, the process is always drawn out: green lawn at night, a gardener’s delight…red yard at dawn, what’s become of the lawn, week after week.

In its sapling days the fall gales cleared the lawn of the maple’s leaves, but those days are long gone. Later, the leaf bounty was such that the kids could frolic in the crispy heaps and piles of  color. Sometimes when a child plunged into a raked pile, the disturbed leaves emitted an unleaf-like odor. After all, it was the family dog’s backyard, too.

When you think about it, each leaf represents the universal cycle of life: from bud, to leaf, and then in a flush of color, the soft release and return to the earth. Born again into the air, solitary, its one and only flight, each leaf makes a final lonely journey. And year after year, the parent tree must grieve a host of children. Rake in hand, mine is a grief of a different nature.

I must give the leaves their due, however. Not only do they provide welcome backyard shade from a summer day’s heat, but become a leafy coverlet also for the dahlias and other vulnerable landscape plants come the inevitable winter days when the temperatures dip into single digits. Each barrow or bagful of leaves I haul to the dahlia patch and deposit strategically between the hills. After I cut and remove the canes, I will return with the rake and carefully mulch each hill with a mound of leaves. Come spring, after the danger of deep frosts has passed, I’ll rake the mulch from the hills into the rows and till it under: good leaf mold to enhance the garden soil.

A moment’s interlude: a brief leaf elegy composed by that punctuation/case insensitive iconoclast sometime painter turned poet, e.e.cummings:

L(A

   L

   E

   A

   F

   F

   A

   L

   L

   S)

ONE

L

I

N

E

S

S

The leaves continue their relentless earthbound tumble, each its own solitary one act play. Leaves, please, leave me alone…. Some releaf, please! Where’s the rake? Uhhhh! Leave us now get to work.

A Breath of Fresh Air in the Valley…

“There comes a blessed moment of the year when we know we are mowing the lawn for the last time,” John Updike stated in his novel The Witches of Eastwick. The other day I mowed the back of the place. Hopefully it was a “blessed moment,” too, the last mowing of 2010.

As I was chugging along the side fence, I breathed in a familiar whiff of something. Now in this Valley of sudden smells, many of which assault the nose quite aggressively, this gentle waft of odor was a pleasant, delightful fragrance. I recognized it immediately: late October, an olfactory message from my quince, “We’re ripe!”

For a bit of “old codger” devilment a couple years back I asked a young man in Safeway’s produce department where I might find the quince. “Quince?”he repeated--as if that sound had never before had utterance. “Let me go ask the manager,” he said, puzzling over the word, as he headed for the rear of the store. A short while later he returned with an apology that there were no quince to be had. More devilment: “You don’t know what a quince is, do you?” “No” was the tentative answer. I left him alone then, poor lad, probably wondering if his encounter with me signified the rest of his work shift.

Quince, a forgotten fruit, an avatar of pioneer days. I am surprised how many folks have neither seen a quince nor heard of the fruit either. Of the four women who took my home canning class last summer only one had seen a quince. And one of participants had never even heard of such a thing. I suppose a little education is in order. Quince belong to the pear family (my quince tree was grafted on pear rootstock), look like pears, grow much the same way: begin as a bulge on the end of a stem and evolve five months later into a pear with a waistline problem. The pear-like similarity ends there. A quince does not smell like a pear; a quince does not taste like a pear; and while a quince will pare like a pear, it cores like a block of wood. A bite of quince will not only pucker you up, it will hurt your mouth while doing it. Biting into a quince is like chomping on a block of balsa wood—without the tart quince flavor, of course. To give you an idea what it takes to quarter and core a quince, I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that the bumbling rustic Peter Quince in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was by trade a carpenter.

So what’s a quince good for, you say? Why plant a quince tree, you ask? I needed no better reason than nostalgia. When I was hardly more than a bulge myself, my mom and dad lived a short time with my maternal grandparents in a rattling old three story house on Wenatchee Avenue. I remember three items in the landscaping of that capacious old house: a trumpet vine plant, a small grove of lilacs (from which I’d snitch small bouquets and sell to the passersby strolling along the Ave), and a quince tree on the south property line. From time to time over the years I thought about that quince tree: the squat, yellow globes, the tart, cardboardy texture of the fruit when I pitted my baby teeth against its unyielding flesh. Those thoughts turned into the quince tree by the back fence.

No, quince don’t lend themselves to an “invite yourself,” fresh, tree-ripened repast—even if you’ve long since lost those infant pearly whites. Nor would I recommend a bowl of sliced quince with sugar and cream ( a much improved dish, less the quince). With quince it’s really the flavor you’re after, thus it’s the fruit for jam and jelly: quince-apple marmalade, quince jelly, cinnamon-sugared quince, quince compote, quince preserves (thickly spread between four layers of yellow cake and drowned in thick swirls of whipped cream). Because of its tartness, you can use quince to make pectin, the substance added to fruit pulp and juice to make them “set.”

And that delicate scent? Try a quince air freshener. Put one in the microwave and zap it for a few seconds, and you have a house full of Glade right from your own backyard. I take a tree-ripened globe and pop it into the trash bag in my truck. For days it’ll outlast those little tree air fresheners from 7-11. Today I installed one in the truck. I’ll have a quince sweetened cab from now until Christmas.

The other day Brett De Vries was doing some fall yard cleanup. I stopped to chat with him a while. Brett commented that just yesterday the Valley was especially malodorous. A little back flushing at the dairy, perhaps?  Since the quince are ripe, too, I’m thinking about rigging up some sort of a hanger device for my ball cap, dangling a quince from it, and heading out with Gladys…see what we can do to freshen up the Valley a bit.

Planting Spring Hope in the Valley…

 

I am weary of the garden. Tilling, weeding, hoeing, watering, propping up the plants, tying up the vines—I am darn tired of it all. This time of the year the backyard garden has become an unruly beast. In his book The Rural Life Verlyn Klinkenborg says of the fall garden: “The common mellifluousness of spring’s new growth is long gone. Everyone in the garden is a character now, for better or for worse.” I look out beyond the boxwood at the tangled jungle and think “Worse! Much worse!” The pumpkin vines have weasled their way among the corn stalks; the zucchini has elbowed aside the zinnias; the tender broccoli is now a thick hedge of seed pods; tomato vines are blighted, heaps of rotten fruit circle the blasted stems; chickweed, like kudzu, swallows the pepper plants. And the first fall windstorm has toppled the bean towers into a vast thicket of vines covering the potato hills. The corn patch looks like someone threw a brutal hand of Pick Up Sticks. The garden is a mess. I’m shed of it, I say. Or as my neighbor Peggy Anderson a while back yelled from the midst of her disheveled vegetable patch: “I HATE this garden!”

Every year, come fall, my old dairyman neighbor Herman Zylstra would express a similar pessimism. Perhaps it rubbed off on me. Herman, however, would always follow up his annual complaint with a  gentle optimism: “But in the spring you get new hope….” Even though we’re rushing headlong toward the winter solstice, I noticed some of this hope in the Valley the other day as Gladys and I tooled our way toward home. In Decks’ fresh cut cornfield I spied a set of discs at the ready, set to turn the field for next year’s planting. A manifestation of hope? Just good farmin’ policy? Or both?

I’ve heard it said “luck is the residue of design.” I would like to think “Forethought is the parent of Hope”; for Hope to manifest itself, you must have something to hope for. And that’s why yesterday—in spite of my mental set-to with the vegetative chaos that is the backyard garden--I did some gardening, planted some spring hope here on the place—spring bulbs, daffodils (jonquils?) and crocus. I like to do a medley in the same pot. Daffodils I layer deeper (they are last to bloom); crocus, those bold, early bloomers, top layered.

 

 

The remaining crocus I plant in the lawn—“naturalizing” they call it-- and each fall I add a few more bulbs. And every spring the yard blooms a bit more.

Other folks in the Valley are hopeful, too. A few days ago a large cardboard box beside Van Hulle’s mailbox called me over to investigate. It was a box of Hope, Hope in the form of tulip bulbs. 

 

 

 

 

 

One fall, several years ago, my dad planted some spring hope even though he knew he was quite ill. “I don’t think I will live to see them bloom,” Dad told Mom. Next spring came. The flowers bloomed. And it is my belief that Dad knew how much we enjoyed them.

And who knows? Maybe the fall floods will wash us away; the winter gales blow us off the map; Jack Frost nip us in the bud…. But you have to hope, for Hope and Spring are eternal. The bulbs are planted. Come spring I hope to see them bloom.

    

                 

 

Breakfast in the Valley: Applesauce Edition

Breakfast is on the Tualco Valley Grange this brisk fall morning and I’m wishing I had rummaged around in the closet for those wool gloves as Gladys and I wobble along in the chilly Valley air. We’re headed for some of that good fall applesauce with pancakes, scrambled eggs, and ham on the side. Yes, today’s the fall edition of the biannual Grange pancake breakfast. (Back in June I posted about the strawberry edition of the Valley pancake fest.) I tuck Gladys around back where she and her shiny new bell will be quite safe and head up the stairs to meet up with breakfast. 

I open the door and immediately go blind. Nothing to do with the inviting medley of breakfast smells or the buzz of the responders to the First Call to breakfast: just my glasses reacting to the warmth of breakfast cooking after that chilly ride down Valley. Someone extends a friendly greeting. Sounds like Alan Barr. I remove my glasses. Yes, it is indeed Alan Barr . “What do I owe you this morning?” I ask. “Five dollars,” Alan says with a smile. I try to inject a little before breakfast humor: “Is that with my Senior discount?” “That’ll be six bucks, then,” Alan replies. Pretty quick this morning, aren’t we, Alan? You must be one pot of coffee ahead of me.

I take a seat in section 6 and look around. A pretty light crowd this morning, but then I’m early. After all it’s Saturday; no need for folks to rush around. Again, there’s the feeling I’ve walked into a Norman Rockwell painting: Wally Armstrong manning the pancake machine; Betty, who is Johnny on the spot (and “Strawberry Betty in the Spring; “Apple”Betty in the Fall) with my coffee, bustling around, her hands full of plates; breakfasters talking up the morning, sharing Valley news…. But it is fall and there are subtle differences. My glasses steaming up, for one…the dahlia centerpieces for another (fall flowers, dahlias).

Betty rushes up to my section carrying a tray loaded with dishes of applesauce. “What’s that pink stuff?”I ask and point at a dish that looks strangely out of place among the other golden heaps of “sass.” “Cinnamon,” she says. “Not for this guy. I like my applesauce straight up and chunky, Betty.” None of that pureed, bland, watery stuff fit only for  babies—and in utero at that. And pink? Unless it’s meat, food just shouldn’t be pink. Chunks are what I want, chunks of apple, lumpy confirmation that what I’m about to consume actually grew on a bona fide apple tree somewhere. Betty places a bowl heaped golden on my placemat.Soon she brings breakfast and with it my second cup of coffee. Two pancakes, a serviceable portion of scrambled eggs, and the obligatory slice of ham. Consistency is what you get at the Grange breakfast, consistency and friendly service.

Nothing goes to waste of that breakfast. I offer to take my plate to the kitchen just as my mother taught me, but Betty takes it, says it’s part of the deal. Alan Barr is still exacting tribute from the newcomers but is between customers, so I wander over for a chat. “How long have you been doing this?” I asked. “Years and years,” the reply, and I think of the big sign on the Grange wall, an accounting of the decade of the ‘60’s year by year: Peace, Love, and Livestock. Wait a minute…livestock? And then like I’ve been tazered, I get it. Grange humor! 1969, the summer of love…WOODSTOCK. I wonder if Alan made that sign, as well. Two pots of coffee at least for that one.

“Didn’t see you here for the strawberry breakfast,” I say. Alan glances around the room in a guilty sort of way. “We were in Hawaii… the whole family went…the trip of a lifetime,” he whispers. I let him off the hook by saying his absence just meant more strawberries for the rest of us.

Alan’s son Scott was there for breakfast, too. He was showing around a pretty fancy homemade sign. “Firewood Cellars”it read. “Is he selling wine or firewood?” I asked Alan. “…because I’m in the market for both.” I learned Scott had been dabbling a bit in winemaking…some rhubarb, a bit of Concord grape… and was establishing a little home winery. I wish him luck with his oenology efforts and hope he comes up with some good, marketable vintages. The area could use another nice homegrown beverage—especially after my experience with Kufnerbrau years back, a home brewed beverage so convenient the bottles actually opened themselves if you waited long enough.

With my pancake breakfast well packed away, I retrieve Gladys and we sidetrack by Werkhovens’ silage bunker, now under wraps and doing a little fermenting of its own, for a photo update. Back on the road and heading for home, I reflect a bit on my breakfast, try hard not to let my thoughts wander off to those Grand Slam breakfasts at Denny’s (soooo NOT-Rockwellian) and return instead to those earlier mentioned subtle differences… that slice of ham, for instance…wasn’t it a bit thinner than usual? Seemed more like a sliver this time than a slice. But the applesauce…now it was prime!

Wrestling with Mondamin…

Let us gather in the harvest,

Let us wrestle with Mondamin,

Strip him of his plumes and tassels,

Of his garments green and yellow.

The Song of Hiawatha/W.W. Longfellow

Four years ago we drove cross country to visit my sister and family in Omaha. We were driving down U.S. 29  along the Iowa-Nebraska border, heading south through vast cornfields. I saw a road sign signifying the exit to the town of Mondamin, Iowa. “Mondamin,” I thought… “Why of course-- Iowa, land of corn and soybeans.” And I remembered an experience from my youth: reading Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha,” (and what a “Long” ditty it is, too). In those days I was hungry for literature and would pore through the books on the family bookshelves looking for excitement. I was fascinated in those days by all things Indian (those were unenlightened times before  “Native Americans.'’ Things Indian or Viking—I even insisted on my classmates calling me “Eric”after Eric the Red—fueled my imagination.)

One book I always returned to: Favorite Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Doubleday and Company, 1947), beautifully illustrated by Edward A. Wilson. I could retreat to Indian lore in Longfellow’s Hiawatha story. What appealed to me was the Indian vocabulary Wordsworth wove into his poem. The poet’s phonetic renderings of the Algonquin-Ojibway dialects transported me to aborigine days; I set myself the task of “becoming Indian” by learning the language, even though the Indians of the Great Lakes region were a half continent away from the Colville Indians I knew, attended school and grew up with. The truth of the matter was I was ignorant of linguistics, didn’t know a language needed more than nouns to parse together a simple sentence. But knowing that Shuh-shuh-gah was a heron, Opechee, a robin, the squirrel Adjidaumo…well, I might just as well have been living in a wigwam and feasting on pemmican myself--or standing before a roaring cataract beside the beautiful Indian princess Minnehaha in the picture on page 205.

Mondamin was one such noun I encountered in the chapter Hiawatha’s Fasting. An important rite of passage for a young brave was a period of fasting during which the Indian youth, in a food deprived state, would experience visions or delusions. In his weakened condition, these dreams often held a sign that would guide his warrior life and yield him the lifelong adult name that would bring the young brave renown on future fields of battle.

In the twilight state between sanity and dreams Hiawatha has a vision in which he saw: 

“…a youth approaching,

dressed in garments green and yellow…

Plumes of green bent o’er his forehead,

And his hair was soft and golden.”

This verdant youth bids the young brave to wrestle with him. Hiawatha, weak from hunger, accepts the challenge and a match ensues. As he struggles with this opponent, Hiawatha feels his strength return. The bout ends in a draw but the youth promises to return the next day and the day after to resume the bout.

True to his word, the blonde boy returns on schedule for Round two. This match, as the first, ends in a draw. This time, however, before he withdraws, the youth shares with his opponent the outcome of the third day contest. Hiawatha will defeat him, the youth declares, and then gives the young brave instructions on what to do with his body, once he’s fallen, how Hiawatha was to strip the garments from him, lay him in a grave where the rain may fall upon him, the sun may come to warm him. “And protect me,” the young oracle says, “let no hand disturb me, keep the weeds and worms at bay, and let not Kahgahgee, the raven, molest me.”

At the the time I was not sophisticated enough a reader to connect Hiawatha’s vision and conflict with the Indian corn myth—Mondamin—Indian lingo for maize. The green garments: tassels, silk, the stalks and shocks themselves; the wrestling: harvest. And the burial and perpetual care? The planting cycle, of course: Mondamin, the Great Spirit’s gift of food to his people. 

The corn myth, depicted in corn itself, was one of the impressive murals in the Corn Palace, Mitchell, South Dakota. The Corn Palace boasts the largest collection of “corny” art in the entire world, we learned, when we sidetracked from I-90 on our Omaha trip. In fact the entire facade of the Palace, enhanced by borders of millet and milo, is corn, thousands of ears, that are replaced annually. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Tualco Valley has its own monument to corn, a cement edifice located at the Werkhoven Dairy. No taking down Mondamin for the fall with a slick wrestling move. The Werkhovens do their corn wrestling with big, diesel gulping machines. Yes, it’s corn harvest time in the Valley. Remember the corn that was knee high last July? It’s coming down, being chewed  up and chopped into silage.

Last Saturday afternoon I caught up with Jim Werkhoven via cell phone. He was en route, as usual, from one field to the next, zipping from one job to another. Before he took the time to answer my many questions, Jim assured me that “We’re not anti-social folks—just doggone busy.” Especially busy this time of year, overseeing the transfer of corn from the fields to silage bunker.  And just how much corn silage does it take to keep all those cow stomachs from rumbling and grumbling over a year? Jim knows. Seven hundred acres, he tells me, from fields in the Valley plus another west of Frylands (the old Diamond M Ranch). And that huge cement bunker? It holds 18,000 tons of silage (folks, that is thirty-six million pounds of corn: chop chop chop). Removing the season’s corn crop from the Valley is quite an operation. Two cutters do the chopping. Werkhovens have passed along a bit of work to Matt Frohning who has his own cutter and does contract work. Matt’s is an older model, just perfect for chopping corn from less mature fields. A second cutter, I learn, not only cuts and chops the stalks but rolls and crushes the cobs as well. This monster machine circles the fields gobbling up six rows per circuit at the rate of five acres per hour.

I learn other interesting facts from Jim. Werkhoven farms has the contract on the Fish and Game Department’s 100 acre cornfield south of the slough. Two-thirds of the field is cut; the remainder left as cover for  the game birds F & G plant for hunters. Eight trucks haul the chopped corn from the fields. Werkhovens own one, hire the other seven. These eight trucks make 1500 to 17oo trips from the field to the farm where they deposit their loads. Four to five minutes is all it takes for those giant cutters to spew ten tons of silage into a truck. The loaded rig pulls away and is quickly replaced by a trailing empty one.

 

 

 

 

 

As the trucks dump their loads in the bunker, big field tractors push the piles of fodder onto the growing mountain of chopped corn. This mound of silage is compacted by three or four tractors whose weight and big dual rear wheels make countless trips back and forth, side to side. This compacting is essential to the fermenting process, Jim says. The constant squeezing forces the oxygen from the pile. Without such compression, the silage will not cure properly. When the harvest is over and the mountain of silage is pressed free of oxygen, the mound will be covered with thick gauge plastic and weighted with tires.

Jim says that they can begin feeding the new silage crop a month after the process is finished, but he likes to wait a while longer—just in case. Nothing worse than hundreds of dairy cows with indigestion. Indigestion? All those stomachs? In the meantime Werkhovens have prudently saved enough of last year’s silage mound to tide the herd over until the new crop is ready to feed.

Jim hopes to have the entire operation complete in less than a week. I don’t think that will happen this year. Gladys and I swung by yesterday, a week later, and the hauling and compacting were still in progress. That must have Jim on edge a bit. He told me he once figured out the cost of keeping those trucks rolling: twelve to thirteen bucks a minute! He followed up those stats with the comment: “That’s information I really didn’t need to know.”I asked Jim what the work days were like during this hectic harvest. He laughed and said, “We knock off around midnight these days. We’re older now!” I drove down to watch the night work. It was an eerie sight: like exhaust belching dragons, the machines roared on through the night, their eyes piercing the darkness, inexorably crushing the air from the green mountain of corn, ever tracing, retracing their paths up and down that humongous mound of green.Thanks, Jim, for sharing this fascinating dimension of our Valley’s dairy industry. I enjoyed our talk. It was doggone “sociable” of you.

The Great Lakes Indians not only wrestled with Mondamin. They had their women perform a sacred rite to bless the cornfields. After the spring planting was complete, on the first dark or overcast night the women of the tribe would perform a ritual to bless the season’s crop. Barefoot and unclad they would make a circuit of the fields to enhance the fertility of the land, to insure its fecundity and a bountiful season’s crop.

Sing the mysteries of Mondamin,

Sing the Blessing of the cornfields.

Ah, yes, just one more thing to look forward to come spring.         

Bears on the Move in the Valley…

I saw nine the other day crossing the Loop Road. About the same number again today, each  shuffling and huffling along the pavement from one side of the road to the other. It seems to make no difference which shoulder they start from, their destination is always a road span away. And each plods along just as resolutely as his fellow to achieve the other side.

No need to be alarmed. No need to rush to REI or Amazon.com to arm yourself with a couple cans of bear mace (yes—can you believe it? Bear mace is available on Amazon.com!) These bears are not those dangerous Ursidae that attack city councilmen without provocation (the bear must have smelled the politician on him. Come to think of it, that’s provocation enough, isn’t it?) And besides, these bears are just “cubs.” No, I’m not talking about the bear that went over the mountain: it’s woolly bears I’m talking about. Those bristly little caterpillars with the red belly bands. And since ‘pillars are insect larvae, they are “cubs,” in a sense, aren’t they?These caterpillars are the larvae of the Isabella Tiger moth, Pyrrharctia isabella, and the road stands between them and a suitable location to pupate: under a loose stone, a crevice in a lifted piece of bark, in your woodpile…some protected place out of the weather.

Ah, yes…the weather. Folklore has it that these little black and orange critters (black and orange? Aren’t those Halloween colors?) presage the severity of the impending winter: the narrower the bands, the harsher the winter. Bugologists pooh pooh this belief: that these colorful crawlers are oracles of winter and claim that not only do “band widths” vary per ‘pillar, but also bands shrink as the larvae age. This is well and good, I suppose, but I wonder if there might be a correlation between the abundance of the bug and the severity of the winter just ahead. Last winter was a mild one here in the Valley. Not so the winter of ‘08, which was a winter of roof shoveling and pushing snow. I don’t remember seeing an abundance of woolly bears last fall, but the year before they seemed to be everywhere. The old Monroe/Snohomish Road was alive with them, a virtual Caterpillar Lane. 

The weather guys at NOAA have already begun their winter scare tactics. After looking at their Dopplers, weather satellites, and marine sensors, 2010 is a La Nina year, they say. Cooler than normal temps in the Pacific—the coolest in fifty years—do not bode well for the Pacific Northwest. El Nino, the lazy brother, of La Nina, was napping last year. But this year his sister, like a fractious child, is poised to wreak havoc in the form of excess precipitation—a considerable amount frozen—flooding (sleepless nights ahead, flashlight in hand, checking Riley Slough across the road), and nights of heavy frost (mulch your dahlias, folks). An uprising of sibling rivalry, of the meteorological kind, with us the beneficiaries. All the predictors indicate that winter 2010/11 will not be our typical “one snowman” winter here in the Valley but one of drifts, plows and shovels—and, who knows, igloos? And those woolly bears? Perhaps there is something in their haste to cross the road after all!

Many woollies never make it to the other side. I’ve already seen countless patches of black and red fur on the Loop Road. My walks in the Valley of late have turned into caterpillar rescue missions. When I see one of these banded crawlers chugging across the pavement, I scoop him up to protect him from traffic, and launch the bug into the grass on the side of the road that was his destination. Immediately after you palm a ‘pillar, it assumes a defensive pill posture, ‘possum-like—a perfect ball for a nice, soft landing in the weeds.The author Walter Edmonds wrote a short story back in the 1920’s, a yarn, actually, about caterpillar racing among the canal men who worked the barges on the Erie Canal. “The Death of Red Peril” is the story of one of these racing ‘pillars. Because of their migratory work canallers took to caterpillar racing instead of betting on the ponies. Contestants would place their little “speedsters” in a napkin ring in the center of the racing circle. A well-placed prick of a pin urged the ‘pillars into motion. First bug to cross the chalk line won.

The narrator’s “Pa,” through a stroke of good fortune happens upon a swift red ‘pillar that literally leaped the wagon wheel ruts in the road to get to the other side. “Pa” rescues the bug, names it Red Peril, and proceeds to race the Peril against all comers. The speedy little insect wins race after race, and “Pa” rakes in the cash, until, that is, an opponent discovers Peril’s “Achilles heel” (or is it “heels” with ‘pillars?): a mortal fear of butter. This rascal drew the racing ring with yellow chalk, and when Red reached the line, he balked, and reversed course. “Pa,” cried, “Foul!” and squashed RP’s opponent before it could leave the circle. A dead bug can’t cross the finish line. Thus a grudge and imminent revenge.

Fast forward to Red Peril’s last race. The rascal owner of the squashed ‘pillar has a stand-in race a bug from his “stable,” a contestant named “The Horned Demon.” No sooner had the handlers pricked their bugs, than the aptly named Horned Demon sinks both horns into RP’s backside, injecting him with ‘pillar venom. Peril labors toward the finish line but falters and appears to be on his several last legs. But “Pa,” through a brilliant stroke of genius, cries, “Now dadgum, you’ve gone and dropped the BUTTER!” The dreaded word spurs Red into life and he struggles to the finish line where he drops dead a winner—his fuzzy chin just over the line!

And so as the Valley’s woolly bears race toward the other side of the road, is there a message in their haste? Is there something in their little caterpillar genomes that, Dopplers, satellites, and marine sensors aside, we should heed? Better make sure that woodshed is bulging, folks. Knock the rust off that snow shovel and keep it handy. If you’ve forgotten the Winter of 2008, let me jog your memory.