OVERSTUFFED

OVERSTUFFED

This afternoon my wife and I will trek 34 miles down the Cowpath of Doom to Rutland, tempted by the Ethnic Festival. Along the way, unless predicted rain overwhelms them, yard and tag and lawn and garage and moving sales will thrust out at us, a cautionary gauntlet before we reach the Sidewalk Sales along Center Street and Merchants Row.
If I had to chose a single word to describe both America and Americans, it would be “overstuffed.” Coming from a family in which the Depression was still a haunting spectre, and married to a woman who was actually born during the Depression, the spectacles of a society where having is replacing doing continue to amaze me.
I’m old enough to remember when the Marche aux Puces was something we learned about in French class: the Flea Market in Paris, home to stalls at which you could find treasures among the gewgaws and knickknacks, especially among the booksellers. Then the idea of the flea market took on a more itinerant American form, in which someone would rent spaces for sellers of all descriptions to assemble on a given day and thus attract more buyers. This built on a well-established business practice of co-locating competitors, something I grasped on a trip to New York City where my group happened to park (that will tell you it’s been awhile) on a street lined with the shops of antique dealers. Together, they constituted an antiques district, something that collectors, if not the general public, would know. Downtown Rutland’s struggle, like that of downtowns all over Vermont, is how to attract people through diversity AND uniformity, a problem that seems to be solved again and again by appealing to upscale buyers.
To continue with the personal history lesson, flea markets soon fragmented, in this individualistic nation, into home-based sales. At first, most were classic American “something going on the side” activities: attempts to raise a little money by unloading what wasn’t truly needed, or even do a little dealing.
Then yard sales shifted gears into something higher. People started holding them just to get stuff out of the house and maybe have a little fun meeting people while doing it. Knowledgeable yard sailors know that moving sales are the best bet, especially late in the day.
Unless the same things go into a free pile. This relatively new development, appearing only in the last decade, has taken the overstuffed situation to a new phase. A somewhat later version of this involves the appearance of roadside furniture, free for the taking, no “free” sign necessary because everyone understands that’s why it’s there.
When I see some apparently excellent bureau marooned on someone’s lawn in this way, I can’t help but think of the joke that was passed around during one of Addison County’s agricultural downcycles. A farmer, exasperated by calf prices so low that they didn’t justify the expense of hauling and auctioning, tethered a calf one afternoon at the end of his driveway with a sign near it saying “FREE.” The next morning he came down and found two calves.
“Stuff, stuff, stuff,” remarked my wife, sitting on what has become known as her besk—the bed being the only place left with enough horizontal space to sort papers. Newspapers and magazines publish cartoons and comic strips that attempt to cash in one the humorous side of stuff, “experts” on the effective habits of personal personnel management offer workshops on how to overcome the cluttering habit, storage units proliferate on the landscape like yesteryear’s chicken coops, and mailboxes tilt from their loads of catalogs and credit card applications.
“This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace/ That inward breaks and shows no cause without/ Why the man dies,” remarks Shakespeare’s Hamlet, speaking of a pointless war over worthless territory between Norway and Poland. Literally, an imposthume was an abscess; figuratively, if the metaphor fits, beware it.
The most sensible response I’ve seen to a situation where used clothing has become essentially worthless and hand-me-down toys are shunned and every elementary school has a huge box of orphaned winter clothing and thrift shops have become major sources of financial aid for college-bound students etc. etc. was the time someone organized a drive—the Borkmans in Brandon were involved--to fill a shipping container with excess stuff and send it to the Third World. Never underestimate poverty’s creativity. I remember seeing one Internet picture from the Darfur in which American feedsacks had been layered over a woven stick frame to create a refugee camp roof. Not much of an advertisement for this country’s generosity, but at least they had a roof over their heads instead of being out in the blowing dust.
Standardized shipping containers, piled onto freighters and trains by the hundreds to move all kinds of goods everywhere in the world, are one of the most plausible ways that a terrorist weapon of mass destruction might successfully enter this country. I suggest that if we set up a counterflow of shipping containers filled with things we don’t need any more, or want others to have as well, we will have our best chance of keeping the terrorist kind from arriving.

Reflections, redundancies, and reiterations can be sent to outabout@sover.net

KITTINTUITION

KITTINTUITION

Perhaps you read the story in the Herald about the hospice cat, the grey-tabby-over-white tomcat with an uncanny sense of when residents of his nursing home are about to die. In 25 cases, he’s been able to predict someone’s demise within a few hours, leading the nursing home staff to call relatives when they see Oscar sniffing and observing someone then sitting and waiting beside the bed.
I was struck by the story because I once lived with a genius tomcat who looked just like Oscar. For now, I’ll tell you just a couple stories of the Bernie-cat’s deeds.
In the year after I finished college, when I was waiting for my wife-to-be to complete her senior year at a nearby school, I lived in a second-floor, side street room. Everyone in the building knew not to let the cat in when he appeared at the door. I would come back and call him, he would bound up, and I would carry him to the second floor room.
Adjacent to that building, but on a different street, was a similar three-story wood frame house—where his favorite female cat lived. I was informed by the people who lived there that on one occasion, he had climbed a three-story tree and jumped to their third-story fire escape and gone through a window to reach her.
Not long before we moved to the country, I had a long talk with the woman of the house. The cat he wanted to reach was a spayed female, who never wanted anything to do with other cats, except Bernie. What they wanted to do together was sit side-by-side in silence on the porch, for hours.
Do we know everything that cats think and feel? Makes me think of the end of Hemingway’s “Fiesta,” later titled “The Sun Also Rises”—“It’s pretty to think so.”
Another story: years after Bernie had been felled by feline leukemia, we had two tricolor sister females, Golda and Indira. Indira was a slut—sorry, cats of the world, but that’s the only way I can accurately describe it—who at the time Golda was killed on the state highway next to our house was caring for a new kindle of kittens.
We buried Golda by the garden, and when we had finished her rites, Indira came walking down that side of the garden. She walked over Golda’s grave, kept on walking, and kept on walking, and never came back. Leaving four-week-old eeps to be fed milk with a dropper. Go figure.
I never worried about Bernie getting killed on that road, after watching him cross it one day. He would wait on a little mound back from the road, then creep toward the dangerous pavement, look and listen, and if he heard a car coming, he would run back to the mound and wait. Then he would creep down and try it again, until he felt it was safe to dash across. One time someone who found him on one of his journeys opened his collar capsule, found our phone number, and called us--from six miles away. As I say, the cat of a lifetime.

Callings, caterwaulings and keelhaulings can be directed to outabout@sover.net

Hell's Own Parsnips

Hell's Own Parsnips

By Ed Barna

I learned about poison parsnips from the same authoritative source that has taught most of the human race most of its lessons: the hard way. One of the best bumper stickers I ever saw said, “OH NO, NOT ANOTHER LEARNING EXPERIENCE.”
Clearing some of the hillside behind my former home in Brandon, I had developed a mysterious rash. I had been very susceptible to poison ivy ever since I was six, when my kind parents decided to keep me from contacting any of “leaflets three let it be” during a family picnic by pulling up and burning all the nearby plants (OH NO, etc.--my face was so swollen I could barely see.). But this was a different rash: purple, in blotches and streaks. A chance visit by a friend brought a diagnosis: “You’ve been into some poison parsnips. If you go through them when they’re wet, you’ll get some of the sap on your skin, and if you don’t wash it off right away, this is what you get.”
I’m writing about this now because two days ago, I tried removing some poison parsnip seedheads when everything was dry, on a clear and cool afternoon, wearing nitrile disposable gloves. Apparently I released some drops of sap while transferring the would-be seeds into a garbage bag, because both wrists now look as if I’d thought about committing suicide. This stuff is ba-a-a-d news.
You’ve seen it, and recognize it, even if you haven’t connected the sight with a name. Blisterweed, to give another of its popular names, now lines many of our roads. In June it looks a little like Queen Anne’s lace; in July it’s tall with clusters of yellow flowers that, again like Queen Anne’s lace (which is actually carrot gone wild) flattened domes (I almost wrote doomes. Maybe I should have.)
Scientifically, this is Pastinaca sativa, according to a Natural Conservancy “Element Stewardship Abstract.” (Those of you thinking it might be related to Cannabis sativa and might make a good smoke should think twice: sativa is the individual name, not the family name. Smoking this stuff could put you in a Dartmouth-Hitchcock movie.)
To go on with the Nature Conservancy, basically they say this one doesn’t deserve to be conserved. “Pastinaca sativa invades disturbed bare areas, especially those with calcareous soils. It is an undesirable exotic weed and produces a compound that causes severe blistering and discoloration on contact with the skin on sunny days, a condition known as photodermatitis. In infested areas it regularly occurs along paths and roadsides where
eradication is desirable from a human safety as well as ecological standpoint.”
When you get into folkloric stories, grimmer things than photodermatitis are attributed to this parsnip from Hell. In a book of tales of Western North Carolina, for instance, one of the stories handed down is of two pre-Civil War slaves on two plantations who had fallen in love. Learning that a man was coming from Texas to marry one of the owners, they realized that unless the Texas man bought the other slave, they would be torn apart. From here on out, I quote the original text: “So, it is supposed, for there was never any tangible proof against either, that these two ignorant and infatuated lovers poisoned William Mast and his wife by putting wild or poison parsnips into their coffee. But the scheme miscarried; for, though William and his wife died that day (October 16), Jacob Mast took Silas to Texas with him, while John Whittington bought Millie and sold her to people in Tennessee, which effectually parted them
forever. Elbert Dinkins of Caldwell county was then teaching school in the neighborhood, and was boarding at William Mast's; and he told Dr. J. B. Phillips of Cove creek the above facts.”
From a Wyoming site that collects historical information and lore comes this: “At the Hill store in Dayton the Post man was shown the roots of two poison parsnips, which caused the death of fourteen head of cattle belonging to W. N. Robinson, two weeks ago. A number of years ago a young boy died near town from eating these parsnips.” This contradicts information later in the story; personally, I don’t feel like making a definite experiment.
But they’re bad enough simply as a nuisance. This is from Daniel Hazlett, who writes a weekly column for the website of a collective of Midwestern farms called Organic Valley: “I'm noticing around that some of the county and township road crews are late in mowing the road side, which is causing a problem with invasive plants. If they wait to mow until the noxious weeds have gone to seed, the mower blades spread seed along the road and these invasive plants spread quickly across the landscape.
“Prickly thistles are becoming more of a problem, with Bull, Scotch, and Nodding thistles popping up everywhere. Garlic mustard plants are spreading out of control and crowding out the native plants that normally would be there. By far, though, the worst noxious weed problem I've witnessed here in the past decade is the epidemic spread of wild poison parsnip.
“Where the summer landscape was once lush and green, you can now see acres of tall, bright yellow flowerheads. The plants grow very close together and each plant can grow six feet tall by the second year. I can't argue that a yellow blanket of flowers doesn't look pretty along the road, but there is much danger in its beauty.
“Brushing bare skin across a flower top will almost certainly raise some very nasty blisters that can scar like a burn. Another discouraging thought is that the seeds may lie dormant in the ground for 6 to 8 years before sprouting. Trying to control the poison parsnips will be a long term battle. It breaks my heart to see what remains of the open grasslands being gobbled up by this yellow-topped invader.”
They’re a problem in parts of New York State, too--enough so that the Delhi News Bureau’s Patricia Breakey went to the Delaware (County) Cooperative Extension for perspectives and advice. The next quotation section has lots of useful information, but it’s lengthy, so if you’re in a hurry and want to see how this essay ends, go to the last paragraph. To continue:
“If you see them, don't touch them, Paul Cerosaletti, Delaware County Cooperative Extension horticulturist, said. "It's wild parsnip, and there is a chemical in the sap that causes burns and blisters when it's exposed to ultraviolet rays in sunlight," Cerosaletti said. "The condition is called phyto-photo-dermatitis. It's every bit as bad as poison ivy — or worse."
“Darlene Crowe, Otsego County Cooperative Extension horticultural program assistant, said the pesky weeds have been in the area for years, but they are particularly numerous this year. "We used to call it blister weed," Crowe said...
“Crowe said the plants were originally introduced to the United States from Asia more than 100 years ago.
"They were introduced on purpose — as a food plant," Crowe said. "The roots are edible.”
“Delaware County Cornell Cooperative Extension educator Mariane Kiraly said wild parsnip is an invasive species that is becoming a big problem. "Somehow, they spread like wildfire, and they need to be contained," Kiraly said.
“Cerosaletti said that the sap is the most noxious when the plant is flowering — and the plants are now at the flowering stage. "It worries me that the wild parsnips could be in an area where kids are playing, and they might pick the flowers," Cerosaletti said...
“The plants grow six feet or taller and they are prolific seed bearers, which is causing them to reproduce at an alarming rate. Cerosaletti said he became concerned about safety issues when his sister-in-law mowed her lawn wearing shorts and developed blisters all over her legs the following day.
“Then he got a call from a Margaretville farmer who had also tangled with the troublesome weed. Lauren Davis, who owns a farm on the edge of the village, said that he and his helper were pulling up the weeds by the roots and didn't realize they are poisonous. "The next day we had burns and blisters," Davis said. "It was the kid that got it worse than I did. Then it scabbed over and got a hard crust. It's not so much painful, but it's extremely irritating. It itches like crazy..."
“Cerosaletti said the chemical in wild parsnip that causes the burning and blistering is found in the green leaves, stems and fruits of wild parsnip. The chemical is energized by ultraviolet light, causing a breakdown of cells and skin tissue. The effects don't appear for 24 to 48 hours later, when the skin develops a red, sunburn-like area. In many cases, after the skin reddens, blisters appear.
Sometimes the area that was burned takes on a dark red or brown discoloration that can last for as long as two years. Parsnip burns often appear as streaks and long spots (EB: Yup.) because the juicy leaf or stem is often dragged across the skin, he said...
"People may not realize that they have been exposed to wild parsnip because of the delayed reaction time," Kiraly said. "When they suddenly develop blisters they don't necessarily connect it to something that happened a day or two ago. And they may not even remember that they were weed whacking or walking through weeds."
Wild parsnips don't like shade, which is at least part of the reason that they grow along open stretches of highway. Cerosaletti said there are huge patches growing along state Route 10 between Walton and Delhi and in other areas throughout the region.
“Delaware County Department of Public Works Commissioner Wayne Reynolds said the local road crews no longer spray herbicides, partially because of complaints from homeowners, concerns from organic gardeners and increased regulations since the Watershed agreement went into effect. "I am warning my crews to be careful when they are moving or working along the roadside, to make sure they protect themselves from the sap and to avoid cutting the wild parsnip where it might enter streams and endanger people who are in the water," Reynolds said.
“Cerosaletti said wild parsnip is a member of the carrot family. It's a biennial plant, which means it takes two years to develop the flowering stalks. It spends its first summer as a rosette of leaves fairly close to the ground. The plant has a long, thick taproot. The second year it sends up a single flower stalk that holds hundreds of yellow flowers in flat-topped, clusters called umbels.
“Controlling wild parsnips is a problem, Cerosaletti said. Cutting the root of each plant with a sharp shovel or spade, just below ground level can help stop the spread. Regular mowing, or grazing by cows, keeps wild parsnip from flowering and making seeds.
“Kiraly said an all-purpose over-the-counter herbicide will kill the plant.” EB: let’s be more specific here. A contributor to a GardenWeb invasive species forum on poison parsnips had this to say: “My burns were like yours, only all over my legs. Made the mistake of having shorts on. I wanted to let people know that weed-b-gone max killed the parsnip but left everything else in good shape. I was using Roundup but that was killing everything. I'm going to be using more weed-b-gone this year.”
Which leads me to a proposal for my fellow Vermonters: a month or so after Green-Up Day, have a statewide Invasive Species Weekend. There are dozens and dozens of botanical terrorists out there on the landscape, threatening to change our beloved state forever. With some advice from UVM Extension, and with some kind corporation donating disposable Tyvek hazardous materials suits (they’re dirt cheap online at www.TekSupply.com), we could fight back. Think about it, the next time you’re driving along this month and see yards and house lots and football fields and cow pastures of tall weeds taking over. They’re yellow; are we?
--30--

Natterings, batterings and blatherings can be sent to outabout@sover.net

Giving Nature a Buzz Cut

GIVING NATURE A BUZZ CUT

(an installment of Gone But Not Forgotten)

Ed Barna

About 30 years ago—a number that signified a generation’s timespan before children began having children—I read an article based on an interview with the last of Ernest Hemingway’s wives.
Tell the young people they should be angry, she said, about what has been done to their world. The natural world used to be so much richer and fuller. It’s been stolen from them, but they can’t see that, because it’s gone, she wanted the world to know.
Today, midway through my 59th year, I find myself in a position to send a similar message, with reference specifically to Brandon, the town where I grew up in the late 50s and early 60s. At that time, there were three TV channels, all received by antenna, with WCAX in Burlington generally the only one that approached consistent watchability. Our family didn’t even have a set, though I would go to friends’ houses to watch the World Series. Such couch potato time as we put in was spent listening to WCAX radio, which rebroadcast such programs as Suspense, Gunsmoke, The Romance of Helen Trent, and Art Linkletter’s House Party—and to WCBM Montreal, which carried the BBC’s Goon Show and The Archers, and Max Ferguson’s folk music programs.
Rather than linger around a set, my two brothers and I headed for the hills, the ones around home, and roamed around town on bikes. Sometimes this was just for fun, but sometimes there was money involved.
I was paid 10 cents a handful for wild asparagus, and that was good enough for two root beers at the Brown’s Drugstore soda counter, so I put some effort into it. I came to know most of the good roots in town, and had nine places where, in season, I could get a handful. Some of these may not seem believable, but that has to do with the point I will later make:
--Park Street Extension.
--High Street.
--Carver Street around the Our Lady of Good Hope Catholic Church.
--Marble Street, including the root at the junction of Marble and Wheeler Road.
--An abandoned private road circling from High Street to Shirley Farr’s old mansion at 53 Park Street.
--Sometimes the historic cemetery behind the Congregational Church.
--An area near the railroad tracks on the northward side of Pearl Street.
--Grove Street where it headed out of town.
--The field where Prospect Street and Walnut Street met, which had been the Brandon High School athletic field, in my time was the Little League field, and now is the site of the Nexus Nano electronics plant.
I doubt that more than a couple of these remain productive, because with expanded housing development have come the wildflowerwhackers. Well, okay, the weedwhackers, but when the sun goes down, there is a lot of wildflower activity having to do with those other-side-of-the-tracks weeds.
The bulldozer and chainsaw get bad reviews for their effects on natural habitats, but I believe if the trimmers’ effects on microhabitats were added up, that tool would be recognized as a major influence on our surroundings. Add up the total amount of vegetation removed (this relates to a previous column on reduced rainfall and global warming) and the amount of water-storing biomass removed by these handy-dandy lawn-expanders would be recognized as a major loss.
Another of my money-making jobs was berry-picking. There were plenty of black raspberries to be had (including those in the aforementioned churchyard), blackberries and blueberries in the hills, and sometimes, if you knew where to look, wild strawberries. Here’s the most unbelievable fact of all: one afternoon in June I picked my mother a full quart of wild strawberries--in the field across Park Street Extension from the slate-roofed barn, now occupied by a house. Try it some time.
In high school, I got paid 10 cents an inch for trout. With the help of an rig I invented--using nearly invisible flyfishing leader ends and small hooks to create tiny balls of worm that worked even in the dead of summer—and with a crude spinner made on a Indian reservation that I dug out of a dusty bin in Chamberlands’s store, which once caught a limit of 12 trout three days in a row—one year I managed to take 210 trout from the Neshobe River. This was an especially welcome relief during the last weeks of the year in high school. Other kids imagined that I spent all my time studying, because I got good grades, but by using time before school and during study halls, I would get all that out of the way and spent afternoons roaming along the river.
But this was nothing compared with the past, old-timers told me. It used to be possible to stand on the banks of a farm field near Forest Dale in the fall and watch a parade of five-pound brown trout cruising upstream to spawn.
And this was nothing compared to the great trout banquet of 1887. Brandon’s town history tells the story, under “This and That, From Here and There” (which, come to think of it, would be a good name for this blog, too):
“In 1887, 1130 pound of trout were caught for a Masonic banquet. J. Simonds caught 480 pounds; L. E. Avery and Mart Allen caught 240 pounds, and others, 180, 131, and 100 pounds.”
The town history also tells the story of a member of the Baptist Church presenting his pastor, the Rev. C. A. Thomas, with “a fine lot of trout.” But, the man said, they had been caught on Sunday.
“Oh, well,” Thomas remarked, as he accepted the gift, “the fish were not to blame.”

Calling Things By Their Rightful Names

CALLING THINGS BY THEIR RIGHTFUL NAMES

Ed Barna

_”Everybody wants the blackberry pie,” said a voice from the kitchen, cutting through the general ruckus of the Salisbury Congregational Church’s ever-popular Pie and Ice Cream Social. “Oh, no,” said a voice inside me. “Do I really have to explain this again?”
_Around July 4, there are no blackberries in Vermont, or at least no wild blackberries. Maybe some research station has genetically melded the blackberry and the mulberry or something of the sort, but I haven’t heard of it yet. Blackberries are a farewell to summer, a kind of grand climax that comes in the latter part of August. Ever since I was seven, when my family spent the summer in a hunting cabin in Sudbury waiting for people to move out of our Brandon house, blackberries have been my favorite, despite their hideously raking thorns. In a good blackberry patch, every berry has its own flavor, and each patch is its own vintage.
_But in second place, I would put black raspberries, which grew wild around our place in Brandon, and right now are busily colonizing the unused garden where I live in Middlebury, in one of the most heavily settled areas. These are civilized berries, usually accessible enough for children to pick, and growing in the darndest places (the back of the Congregational Cemetery in Brandon used to have a rich vein, and if they drew fertility from the old farmdwellers buried there, I never felt those thrifty folk would mind). “Blackcaps,” folk used to call them, that being a simpler way of setting them apart from blackberries than saying “black raspberries.” Indeed, the fruit form a cap at the end of a stem, whereas blackberries are sometimes so elongated that we used to call them “fingerberries.” Blackcaps have a unique, splendid taste, and though seedier than blackberries, make exquisite pies and jam, if any survive being available in the kitchen raw.
_Since they can be such a gift of nature, I want to tell my readers how to nurture them, which is the same as how to rescue them from their worst pest. I have seen whole patches vanish due to cane borers, but once you know how to recognize what is going on, they are extremely easy to stop.
_If you see the tip wilting on a blackcap cane, that means a borer has laid an egg at the end of the tip, and the worm is now tunneling down toward the root. Snap off the wilted tip, a couple inches below the wilted part (take it home and go on a worm hunt with the kids).
_The best part of doing this is, nipping the tip is how you prune blackcaps for peak production. They grow in a two-year cycle: the first year the green canes are fresh and vigorous and concentrated on growth (if the cane tips over, the tip can put down roots and spread the patch—something to remember if you want to start your own). The second year, the canes look worn and wasted and beat up—because they are productive. I look at them and think of parents I know, lined and weary, carrying an increasing number of little hurts as their bodies push on, providing for their children’s Playstations—a word I use here with college tuitions in mind as well as technological whizzbangs.
_So, to recapitulate, black raspberries aren’t blackberries, even if they are black berries. I’ll have more to say about blackberries when the season starts, including a way to make blackberry jam-jelly that is almost seed-free.
_But now, since this blog is about rightful names, I want to add my name to whatever constituency there is for renaming Camel’s Hump. This noble peak, visible from so many points that it has a good claim to being THE Vermont mountain, clearly resembles a couching lion. (This is an old, nearly bygone word that signifies crouchlike sitting—Merriam Webster gives it the meanings “to lie down or recline for rest or sleep” or “to lie in ambush.” There is a horror story whose title is “The Couching at the Door.”) French uses the word “couchant,” meaning “sleeping.”
_The summit in question ought to be “Catamount.” No need for any other appellation; it deserves the same status as Killington, a name which usually stands alone (Are you sure whether it’s Killington Mountain, Mount Killington or Killington Peak? Actually, the last).
_This is also the name of Vermont’s mythical or totem animal, the mascot of the University of Vermont (which has a spectacular view of Cam..you know, the one with the same name as a cigarette). Speaking of which, as the husband of a Penn State grad, I have learned about Nittany Lions, also mythical-totem animals. It seems that that a Penn State team was at a gathering where other teams were boasting about their wildcats and lions and so forth, and one of the members chimed in that they couldn’t be any stronger than the lion that roams Mt. Nittany, near the Penn State campus. From this inspired piece of undergraduate caterwauling has come many things, including an on-campus statue of a Nittany Lion, which in turn appears on a lot of Penn State sports gear.
_So a mountain lion doesn’t have to be visible to be an important presence. In Vermont, disputes rage among the “Pantherites,” who believe the many sightings indicate a wild population, and the wildlife officials, who say the sightings are probably pets let loose upstate when they became troublesome to keep (imagine the litterbox).
_I would like to offer a compromise in this conflict: just say that Vermont has Tantamounts.
_On a more serious note, I urge anyone who has not read George Orwell’s essay on politics and the English language to do so. As he said then, we seem to be in the midst of a campaign not to call things by their rightful names, and the failure to do so is a symptom of much larger disorders.
_To conclude with an observation derived from visiting my late parents when they lived in Miami, which is a Hispanic rather than an American city: A rose by any other name is rice.

Stray comments from those with too much time on their hands, mutual blatherings, and irate bristlings can be directed to outabout@sover.net

Weather Underground

WEATHER UNDERGROUND

Ed Barna

This being the Fourth of July, a time to consider what it means to be an American, I want to share a way that anyone online can be part of a worldwide community. I do care about this country, but the idea of a nation is indivisible from the existence of other nations, and the better we know and the more we appreciate other countries, the more we will appreciate and the better we will know our own.
“Everyone talks about the weather,” goes an old saying, “but no one does anything about it.” Today, we know the last part isn’t true. All our actions influence climate change, and the worldwide community I will momentarily describe shares an in-depth knowledge of this.
In Vermont, though, talking about the weather is still the most common way for strangers to get from grim to grin. Maybe the information exchanged is banal, but as Winston Churchill famously said about negotiations, “Jaw jaw is better than war war.” This northland eye-on-the-sky-speak isn’t just heritage from our predominantly agricultural past, when an old-timer with a deeply intuitive weather sense might indeed have a better understanding of when it was safe to put in seed or to cut hay or go to market. We divide up the land, making our homes our castles, but we share the air--as one contemporary poet puts it in a piece about the seeming humanity of the moaning and crying of a strong night wind, “we go all the way to the wind/ and the wind goes everywhere else.”
Which brings us to Weather Underground. The name of this online gathering, accessible by all at www.wundergound.com, comes ultimately from a Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in which he raps (he was a pioneer rap innovator, in case you hadn’t noticed) “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The political thrust of that line did not go unnoticed by a faction of the leftist Yippies who, frustrated by the failure of peaceful methods to end the Vietnam War, decided to try violent upheaval—under the name The Weather Underground.
Today’s Weather Underground is a peaceable lot, exception for the violence implied in some of the storm pictures that people from all around the world sometimes post on the site. Under the categories of Very Important Pictures (weather disasters like the recent flooding in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas), Approver’s Choice (subtitled “a bit of inspiration”—good shots, of anything outdoors), Weather, and Outdoors, both amateurs and pros contribute. Aside from some people putting their names on the shots, the participants don’t let copyright considerations block them from letting people make personal use of the medium-resolution photos.
People can email back and forth via the site, or blog, so it has truly become a community. An expert in bird identification will help someone put a name on a rarer species for that area; a pro fotog will give tips to someone who says they’re just beginning and would welcome critiques; and the captions, sometimes quite extensive, give the homebound an opportunity to ride a virtual tour bus. When a regular poster goes silent, there is general concern; right now, for instance, a lot of people are waiting for Lampy, a railroad enthusiast, to post another of his fabulous train-in-operation shots.
“What a unique way to see the world through others’ eyes!” writes kathydee in Ohio, who had sent in 331 pictures—all of which can be viewed, 50 at a time, by clicking on her online handle—of which 11 were Approver’s Choices. One of the latest was a heartbreaking picture of an old coal miner’s two-room disability retirement homestead—a friend of kathydee’s who will no longer bring her blackberries despite his ailments because he just succumbed to them. This site has heart.
Last night I started listing the countries from which pictures had arrived on Weather Underground. With only 12 hours gone, the following have taken part: Montenegro, Latvia, Belize, Croatia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Slovakia (maybe should count as two because Lena from Slovenia is vacationing there), Greece, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Bahrain, Thailand, and the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. I know, the last isn’t a country by legal definition, but for true it is one of the ends of the earth. Russian, Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, India, Japan, Mongolia, and many more have chimed in at other times.
Ends of the earth: there are people who climb mountains and send back their peak experiences; seashore dwellers document the infinite moods of the seascape; veteran wildlife photographers add closeups that no casual picturetaker could ever equal; and stormchasers, that death-defying breed who go after tornadoes and travel TOWARD hurricanes, send images that can be genuinely terrifying. Vermont, be glad you’re in a geographical location where the big storm systems arrive exhausted and panting: there are clouds in the middle states of this country that are enough to make you shake, never mind the storms themselves. Look up superstormchaser Mike Theiss’s glimpses of supercells that look like they arrive with instructions to 1. Open chuck; 2. Insert drill; 3. Tighten chuck; 4. Send pieces flying everywhere and leave a big hole behind.
Spend a year looking at Weather Underground and it’s hard not to believe in climate change. Not “global warming” exactly, because the extra energy that the warming puts into the system drives it to all kinds of extremes. Kansas soaks while Florida burns. London gets hail on July 3 so deep it looks like the sidewalks and streets are deep with snow, while elsewhere you get to see what it’s like driving into a dust storm. At one point earlier this year, a location reported flowers opening two months early, with snow on top of them. Lightning bolts so powerful that the photographer was scared even while in his car. Coldest on record, warmest on record, hurricane winds without a hurricane—meteorologically, it’s a world gone mad.
So, as I implied earlier, there is a serious side to all this weather talk. As quietly as the fog that sometimes swallows half of the Golden Gate Bridge, so that it appears to emerge from a tunnel, the necessary consensus is building.

comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome at outabout@sover.net

Doctors and Strange Objectivity

DOCTORS AND STRANGE OBJECTIVITY, OR
HOW I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED
TO LOVE THE BLOG

By Ed Barna

Like most serious journalists, I have wrestled with the question whether or not it’s possible to be truly objective. The immediate answer wasn’t difficult: post Freud, anyone who says it’s possible to see your own prejudices is saying you can see your own shadow; and I would add, since there is an irreconcilable divide between fundamentalisms and open-minded points of view (either spiritual or not), anyone whose idea of objectivity is based on giving differing stances equal consideration is going to be considered a heretic by someone else.
Such problems with objectivity helped inspire “New Journalism,” which the much-publicized Hunter Thompson practiced with fewer positive results than many unheralded others. Today’s bloggers are New Journalism’s heirs, and I count myself among them: I feel I can get at things in these digital columns that I never could while trying to keep the peace between factions.
Nevertheless, there is such a thing as relative objectivity, and given the wide spectrum of possible biases, I believe a journalist should never cease trying to be objective. Just making the effort goes a long way toward keeping the peace. Especially, it’s important for a journalist to be well-informed, even though the ignorant will shout “Bias!” when a journalist introduces things that he or she, the such-and-such intaleckshool, presumes to know.
Above all, it’s vital for journalists to keep their humility: to expect the unexpected, not to be surprised at being surprised, and to remember that scientists, whom analytical philosophers will argue create the only true objects (cf. Intentions in Architecture, Christian Norberg-Schulz), say again and again that the more questions they answer, the more they realize are unanswered—that the more they know, the better they know how little they know.
I want to tell you of a surprising experience in this regard, one that has had life-changing consequences (such as being very, very hungry right now). In the past year, I underwent a medical procedure that required a spinal block, meaning the lower half of my body was dead to the world while the upper half went merrily along (I’m tempted to say something here about drugs and the mind and the two primary political parties, but in the interest of objectivity will refrain from doing so).
At one point, one of my hands strayed down to my stomach, and I felt for the first time, objectively, what it’s like to be fat. GROSS, unutterably DISGUSTING. Here was this quivering lump of lard that was ME, but which, were I to encounter it in a dark alley, I would conclude had probably been dumped there for the garbage truck to pick up. This sickening thing, this man-eating BLOB, had to go.
It’s been said that spending time in a Third World country educates a teenager faster than almost any other experience. I wonder if the beneficiaries of such an excursion feel a comparable revulsion on their return, only about our affluent lifestyle in its entirety.

Comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome at outabout@sover.net

Casting a Dry Spell

I don't know what happened to the last posting, but only the end of the entry appeared. This is the whole thing. Sorry.

CASTING A DRY SPELL

By Ed Barna

I noticed the phenomenon first in the mid-1970’s, when I was gardening with the kind of seriousness that characterized the Back-to-the-Land Movement. Having read of a CIA report predicting that a billion people could die of starvation in the near future, I had decided two things: 1. All those starving people are going to come after us—a conclusion that I was to see confirmed a decade later when foreign competition turned River Rouge and other major factories of the Upper Midwest into the Rust Belt; 2. We need to make as much local land as productive as possible—a conclusion I now see validated in the Localvore movement.
So I set about creating a garden where Robert Frost once had one (this was in Derry, New Hampshire), and kept going despite learning that his aversion to the hard work of farming had been at least partly inspired by a garden site chock full of rocks, ideally suited for growing witch grass, acidic, and pestered by woodchucks. By the end, I was doing 6,000 square feet without any power tools other than help from Old Draggletail, a friend’s Troy-Bilt rototiller, during the spring.
With that much produce at stake, and initially with a hand-dug well, I kept a weather eye and listened to the weather reports. It did not take long to discover a disconnect: again and again and again, too often to be by error, rain was predicted but did not come. At that point, pre-computers, previous weather reports were the best key to the future consequences of particular conditions. Clearly, signs that in the past had meant rain no longer had that meaning.
Initially, I thought the problem was too much development of land, especially too much pavement and concrete, which meant fewer plants. Green things don’t drink as we do, but they need an uninterrupted flow of water from their root hairs to the stomates (which can be opened and closed) under their leaves. The latter release moisture into the air, not by respiration or perspiration but by “transpiration.” In one year of the early 1970’s, Derry was in the top 10 communities in the United States for pace of development, so it was easy to think of overdevelopment as a culprit.
More recent reading has confirmed that such a decrease in a major source of resupply for clouds is indeed a factor. But in the last few years, two researchers from Stanford University and NASA have discovered other, more insidious reasons why we keep seeing big, black clouds that deliver nothing but big shadows.
As you probably remember from school, raindrops and snowflakes don’t just condense out of the air, they form around some kind of nucleus. Suppose you have a certain quantity of water in the air, in the form of water vapor. If you have a larger number of little bits of dirt, dander, pollen and so forth in the air, does that mean the water is divided by them, so there isn’t as much water per particle? Could the amount per particle drop below the amount needed for a water drop to be heavy enough to drop to earth?
Yes, yes, and no rain—that’s what the researchers at found. This is from a Stanford University explanation of the report: “Atmospheric water forms deposits on naturally occurring particles, like dust, to form clouds. But if there is pollution in the atmosphere, the water has to deposit on more particles. Spread thin, the water forms smaller droplets. Smaller droplets in turn take longer to coalesce and form raindrops. In fact, rain may not ever happen, because if the clouds last longer they can end up moving to drier air zones and evaporating.”
“Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink,” as the popular version of the line from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” puts it.
But it’s worse than that, the account said. All those little droplets in the air constitute clouds, which cool the ground below, which reduces the amount of water that evaporates or transpires.
But it’s even worse. As the report put it, “aerosolized particles created from vehicle exhaust and other contaminants can accumulate in the atmosphere and reduce the speed of winds closer to the Earth's surface, which results in less wind power available for wind-turbine electricity and also in reduced precipitation, according to a study by Stanford and NASA researchers.
"’These aerosol particles are having an effect worldwide on the wind speeds over land; there's a slowing down of the wind, feeding back to the rainfall too,’ says civil and environmental engineering Associate Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, co-author of the study with the late Yoram J. Kaufman from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who died in May 2006. ‘We're finding a reduction of rain, and that can lead to droughts and reduction of water supply.’
“Jacobson and Kaufman's study, based on NASA satellite data of aerosol accumulation, measurements of wind speeds over the South Coast Basin in California and in China, and computer model simulations over California as a whole and the South Coast Basin, was published online Dec. 27 in Geophysical Research Letters. The researchers used both the model and data to study the effects of aerosol particles on wind speed and rainfall.”
Here we interrupt the flow of scientific thought to provide some background on a key term: aerosol. The conventional meaning brings to mind spray cans, but the scientific meaning involves many more kinds of particles.
Julian Frey of the University of California at Berkeley wrote, “aerosols remain the least understood component of the climate system. Aerosols are solid or liquid particles suspended in the atmosphere, consisting of (in rough order of abundance): sea salt, mineral dust, inorganic salts such as ammonium sulfate (which has natural as well as anthropogenic sources from e.g. coal burning), and carbonaceous aerosol such as soot, plant emissions, and incompletely combusted fossil fuel. As should be apparent from this list, there are many natural sources of aerosol, but changes have been observed in particular, in the atmospheric loading of carbonaceous aerosol and sulphates, which originate in part from fossil fuel burning.”
Getting back to the Stanford and NASA report, “aerosol particles floating in the atmosphere absorb or scatter solar radiation, and prevent it from getting to the ground. This cools the Earth's surface and reduces daytime vertical convection that mixes the slower winds found near the ground with the faster winds at higher altitudes. (author’s note: This tendency of hot air to rise during the day builds those ‘fair weather cumulus’ clouds on fine summer afternoons.) The overall effect is a reduction in the speed of near-surface winds, which Jacobson has calculated to be up to 8 percent slower in California.
“Clean and renewable, wind power made up 1.5 percent of the Golden State's energy portfolio in 2005, according to the California Energy Commission. But slower gusts may reduce wind's economic competitiveness compared to other energy sources, such as fossil fuels.
"The more pollution, the greater the reduction of wind speed," Jacobson says. Aerosol particles may be responsible for the slowing down of winds worldwide. Wind supplies about 1 percent of global electric power, according to Jacobson. Slow winds may hinder development of wind power in China, where it's a needed alternative to dirty coal-fired plants. Aerosols' reduction of the wind also may explain the reduction in the Asian seasonal monsoon and "disappearing winds" in China, observations found in other studies. Moreover, slack air currents may hurt energy efficiency in Europe, where countries like Denmark and Germany have made major wind-power investments.”
As if this weren’t enough, Frey points out that the cooling effects of so many aerosols in the atmosphere may be disguising the severity of global warming. Getting rid of our pollution thus may increase, at least in the short term, the overheating. In his own words, “while overall net radiative forcing is positive (warming), aerosols provide the dominant negative (cooling) forcings. Hence, the aerosol currently in our atmosphere is acting to mask some of the greenhouse gas-induced warming. This means that as we get our act together to reduce fossil fuel use to improve air quality and address global warming, we need to be mindful of how changes in emissions will impact aerosol concentrations and composition.”
For a last twist of the knife, Frey discusses another possible masking of effects: the way cooling from aerosol accumulation may have influenced the historical records, which are being used to predict the extent of global warming. His exact words: “Aerosols contribute significantly to the uncertainty in climate sensitivity because we cannot model their historical impact on the temperature record with sufficient accuracy, though additional constraints on climate sensitivity such as the last ice age do exist. A better understanding of aerosols then may well facilitate more accurate predictions of future climate responses to changing CO2.”
But Frey was ready to make one prediction, based on hard facts about the chemical nature of the substances involved: “The relative lifetimes of CO2 and aerosol in the atmosphere result in the expectation that reducing fossil fuel use will accelerate warming. A CO2 molecule has a lifetime of about 100 years in the atmosphere, while an aerosol particle has an average life expectancy of only about 10 days. Therefore, if we instantaneously ceased using combustion engines, the (cooling) fossil fuel-related aerosols would be cleaned out of the atmosphere within weeks, while the (warming) CO2 would remain much longer, leaving a net positive forcing from the reduction in emissions for a century or more.”
In the old days, this was known as “painting yourself into a corner.” Is it any wonder that so many former (or continuing) back-to-the-landers who developed a good weather eye are now activists about climate change?

Casting a Dry Spell

The relative lifetimes of CO2 and aerosol in the atmosphere result in the expectation that reducing fossil fuel use will accelerate warming. A CO2 molecule has a lifetime of about 100 years in the atmosphere, while an aerosol particle has an average life expectancy of only about 10 days. Therefore, if we instantaneously ceased using combustion engines, the (cooling) fossil fuel-related aerosols would be cleaned out of the atmosphere within weeks, while the (warming) CO2 would remain much longer, leaving a net positive forcing from the reduction in emissions for a century or more.

Comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome at outabout@sover.net