On the Loose in the Valley...

Usually it's midday when Gladys and I take our morning exercise. Midsummer now, the days hotter, so today I decided to take advantage of the cool morning and still air (Gladys hates a headwind). Backing into the Swiss Hall parking lot, I was surprised to see the environmentally sensitive Nancy L chatting with a woman on the Hall's back porch. Out for her walk, I thought, ever vigilant the Valley isn't filling up with trash. As I was offloading Gladys, Nancy L wandered over to share news that four of Werkhovens' calves had escaped and were out and about somewhere in the Valley. "They found one," she said, " but three are still on the loose." I looked across the field to where a band of green stood out above the pasture grass. This summer's corn crop. As I pedaled off, I told Nancy I hoped the calves weren't out there somewhere in the corn.

The corn stalks are chest high or taller and put in me in mind of our trip to the mid-west ten years ago. We had left the main drag to visit South Dakota's Badlands National Park. At one of the "scenic viewpoints" we looked out over what looked like miles and miles of humongous inverted egg cartons. Mountains of mounds and hillocks as far as the eye could see. A sightseer who shared the view with us remarked: "Helluva place to lose a cow." I'm sure those words had been spoken at that site countless times, but they were original to me, and I thought about them again, this time in the context of acres of corn and three stray calves.

On down the road a ways I was glad to see a fellow and three girls insinuating themselves between three spotted calves and the verdant cornstalks. The lost had been found and were now being chaperoned back to the calf pens. "Ah, the escapees," I told the cowherds as I pedaled by. "Just glad they weren't in the corn," the man replied.

As we pedaled by the stands of corn along the river I wondered what course of action Werkhovens might take in the future should more wayward stock wander into the corn. Aerial surveillance? A drone perhaps? It seems like those high tech whirlybirds are everywhere these days. (A couple Saturdays ago a drone was flitting back and forth over the heads of a wedding party at the event venue south of our slim acre; a wedding photographer had taken his art airborne.)

On the return leg I came upon Steve Werkhoven and the three young lady cowherds by the dairy milk house and stopped to fill in the rest of the story. There are many a head of calves at the dairy, and I was curious how they knew some of the herd were missing. One of the girls said someone had seen them running along the road and then out in Decks' hayfield. They were able to corral one but the other three escaped and disappeared. It was then I learned my thoughts had dovetailed into calf recovery. Steve said Decks had a drone, did a flyover of the area, and located the calves sauntering along the riverbank. All that remained was to herd the prodigal bovines back to the calf stalls. Werkhoven told me the dairy had seven hundred acres planted in corn. " A drone might be a good investment,"I told him. "Yeah," he replied, "They usually just hang around the calf barns though," and went on to say they'd have wandered home sometime anyway.

Maybe so, I thought, yet the dairy folks had had to leave their morning routines to retrieve them, hadn't they? Without the aerial reconnaissance they might still be searching. And that seven hundred acres is one helluva big corn maze....

Grammy...Or Charlie?...

It's hard to believe Kelly Bolles' great horticultural experiment, trifling with truffles, (Trifling for Truffles or there's a Fungus Among us in the Valley), is now in its eighth year. I think about his project and those exotic 'shrooms every time Gladys and I huff and puff our way past the oak and hazelnut grove especially planted to foster a crop of the gourmet fungi. Five years, Kelly told me, the earliest he could expect any sort of crop. "If I could just find a truffle like this, " Kelly grinned, configuring his fingers in the shape of a softball, "I'd have it made." Or something to that effect, in other words a gourmet gold nugget....

Whenever I see Kelly these days, I ask for an update. As of this post the Valley's sometime truffle king has yet to unearth a single gnarly corm. I'm no expert on truffle horticulture, certainly haven't done the research Kelly has on the crop, which he geared to the Pacific Northwest truffle industry that's well established in Oregon. My knowledge of the elusive fungi is limited to European truffles, a subject that crops up every so often in the news. For centuries in truffle country, especially France, truffle foragers have used the keen olfactory ability of pigs to locate and root out the treasured mushrooms. In keeping with Old Country tradition, come potential harvest time, Bolles purchased a pair of porcine truffle seekers, but I wonder if Kelly's new help might have put his fungal venture in jeopardy.

Here's where the Valley truffle adventure becomes more interesting. Pigs love truffles just as much as the French gourmand. Once a truffle hog roots up a prize, the pig's handler must pounce on the find immediately before his assistant can scarf it down. I'm sure Kelly was aware a truffle sniffer could and would down the crop if the handler didn't quickly intervene. Perhaps Kelly's research focused on the growing of truffles more than the harvesting of them. Not sure about that, but after the fact, when the pigs were hired on, Bolles learned that a potential truffle hunter has to be trained in the art, training that should begin at the piglet age. Kelly's two pigs? Both mature hogs. And apparently you can't teach an old hog new tricks.

You might say the pocine pair are now a Valley fixture, and as you drive the Lower Loop Road south of Werkhoven corner and happen to see afield what appear to be two large dogs in the vicinity of Kelly's truffle grove, those'd be Grammy and Charlie. I caught them unaware the other day and thought I'd snap a photo, but when I approached, Grammy...or Charlie was having none of it, snorted and waddled briskly off, presenting only his or her porkly backside to the camera.

"How are Grammy and Charlie these days?" I asked Kelly last fall when our paths crossed.  It was flood season and he was worried about them. "They weigh nearly four hundred pounds apiece," he told me. "If we have a flood, I can't pick 'em up...they'll drown. I need to build a critter pad so they can escape should it flood." He has yet to build a higher ground refuge but as it's not flood season, I don't think mounding a pig escape is Kelly's priority.

When I mentioned bacon, pork chops, and cracklin's, Kelly laughed and shook his head. As we pet owners know, naming an animal elevates its status to that of pet, and it appears Grammy and Charlie are now part of the Bolles's household, not likely to become pulled pork or pan fried side meat. But Kelly's always looking for an angle: "Maybe I should train and sell truffle dogs," he chuckled,  "There's real money in that..." as a trained truffle dog has little interest in downing a pricey mushroom. While he's sharing this with me, I'm thinking about Grammy and Charlie, the way they've bulked up, and how I frequently see them rooting about in the truffle grove. Perhaps they're finding more there than cover and shade?

Meanwhile when fall rolls around, Kelly has hazelnuts for sale and even extends the courtesy of a stock tank in which one can dunk his hazelnuts to see which sink or float (the floaters contain no meat). I'll close this post by sharing a question I put to Kelly one day: "How can you tell which is Grammy and which is Charlie; their markings are the same?" "Charlie has tusks," he said,... good information to have the next time I get close enough to snap another photo.

The Glorious Fourth...

The Fourth of July was the memory of a new republic, a bloody babe of destiny, waiting to be filled with soul.

Ross Lockridge, Jr.                                           
Raintree County                                         
                                                                                             

To look at the sweet corn you wouldn't believe it. Independence Day, 2019, and the corn is yellow and stunted, barely ankle high. Looks like"Knee high by the Fourth of July" will have to wait for the next corn season. I tilled up the first planting which yielded a meagerly dozen sprouts out of two rows. The second planting, while well-sprouted, lacks the robust growth corn usually experiences this time of year. But please excuse the corniness. The subject of this post concerns the 243rd birthday of this our Grand Republic.

This Glorious Fourth, I'll spend like last year's: listening to Sousa marches and the patriotic songs rendered by the forceful chorus of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from their "Spirit of America" CD. The pyrotechnics I'll leave to the younger, more adventuresome set; those days of crump, crackle, and boom I've left behind, thankfully with all fingers and limbs intact, hearing only slightly diminished. I'll miss, however, the homemade ice cream and butterscotch brownies.

In honor of the day perhaps I should revisit the Declaration of Independence, brush up on the Constitution of the United States, read some of the fine print. Or perhaps a bit of Thomas Paine.... (Seems to me the pamphleteer's messages are currently--and sadly--foreign to the powers that be.)

But no thanks. On this celebratory day I can't think of a more patriotic thing to do than pull my favorite novel from the bookshelf, the only novel this confirmed reader has read twice, flip through the pages to my favorite passages (my copy bristles with sticky notes), and revisit the grand panoply of our Great Republic in the latter half of the 19th Century.

Raintree County is a sprawling novel. And at times a brawling novel. (The manuscript Lockridge delivered to Scribner's publishing weighed twenty pounds.) It covers a tumultuous epoch of our country's history, the britches bustin' period spanning the Clay/Polk presidential election of 1844 to  1892, a half decade that saw the Westward movement and the closing of the frontier, the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, and the transcontinental linking of our infant railroad system, "binding ocean to ocean in bands of steel." The fulcrum of the story line is July Fourth, 1892, and the slate of celebratory events scheduled for the day. The story begins with protagonist Johnny Shawnessy preparing to participate in the festivities. Events of the day trigger flashbacks that skip the story back and forth across five decades of history including seven memorable July Fourths. Though successive chapters might record events decades apart, the ending sentence, each incomplete, is skillfully linked to the beginning sentence of the next. This device, though delightful, makes the novel a challenge to read. Every Glorious Fourth I consider it a patriotic duty to revisit Lockridge's epic novel and thus once again...

happy birthday to our Grand Republic. May it thrive and prevail as a safer...and more to the point, saner beacon for the world.