One More Cat Life Gone

One More Cat Life Gone

Ed Barna
My apologies for not maintaining this blog with the frequency that I’d like, but I’ve been busy losing one of the nine lives I’ve inherited from living with many generations of cats.
I’m 60, the age at which prostate glands start turning into prostrate glands. On a followup to a previous operation known in the trade as a “laser turp” (high-tech roto-rooter job), my urological surgeon detected a slight abnormality that we agreed justified a biopsy to see if it was cancerous. Negative—but during the procedure, somehow E. coli or a similar bacterium got into my bloodstream. A couple Fridays ago, I woke up barely able to walk, barely able to talk, and pouring sweat. Was I simply tired from the operation in Colchester taking place right after a very heavy bout of round-the-clock work? Or should we go to the emergency room at Porter Hospital, just across town?
Here’s an example of the difference health insurance can make: had I been alone and uninsured, I might well have dropped back in bed, then dropped off the face of the earth. As if was, Irene took me to Porter, where they immediately set up two intravenous antibiotic lines and a hearth monitor, and took samples to send to Burlington. Temperature 104 F., blood pressure 40, heart rate 200, and a huge stress-related blood sugar spike.
I spent the first day in the ICU (intensive care unit), crowded around by so many beeping and blinking devices that I half expected the commander of this submarine to shout “Ready forward tubes!...Fire one!” The only reason they sent me to a regular room was that someone else needed the I-See-You-And Everybody-Else-Does-Too worse than I did.
One of the antibios worked, and as I write this, a little more than a week later, I’m still taking some heavy duty stuff. But at last I feel up to blogging. . Blood-uglies or not, the show must go on.

ps
From now on, I’m going to start each blog with a notice that anyone who wants an email alert that I’ve posted something else can tell me so via [email protected], and get on the email list.

Awash

AWASH

Ed Barna

I’m a native Vermonter, I’ve lived 50 of my 60 years in Vermont, and in my 25 years as a newspaper reporter I’ve seen more than my share of strange things. But I’ve never seen anything like the parking lot Saturday night at the Addison County Fair and Field Days.
This event is billed as Vermont’s most agricultural fair, which is plausible given agriculture’s major presence in the Champlain Valley. This in turn is logical because of, in one four-letter word, clay.
To simplify somewhat, clay is ground-up mountains. Since Vermont had two-mile-high glaciers doing the grinding, the particles in Addison County’s clay approach the nanotechnological. While this makes the soil wonderfully fertile—minerals are more accessible in smaller particles; think of how much of a fistsize rock is on the inside versus the outside—also it makes the wet clay infuriatingly, gruesomely gluesome.
Which brings us to Saturday night. My wife and I were headed for Field Days at sunset, so she could pick up the beaded necklace that had won a ribbon just short of the Grand Prize. Simple errand, we thought.
But when we got there, two things were apparent: the place was packed, and the parking lot wasn’t. The roads between the parking places were fine, having through the years received enough gravel and cracked marble waste to support a skyscraper during annual bouts with the wet clay. The parking “spaces” were something else.
Where they weren’t churned into mire, they had vehicle tracks up to a foot deep going through them, in a kind of demonic Death by Chocolate topping off what had been a placid hayfield. We drove where the parking directors directed, searching for anything that looked like it wouldn’t engulf our Saturn in the Green Mountain State’s version of the La Brea Tar Pits, with no success. The liquidity that has dried up in the nation’s financial system apparently had taken a holiday in New Haven, Vermont. Through windows closed so we wouldn’t get spattered, we could hear the sorts of engine whines that normally accompany an ice storm, or on a smaller scale the death throes of flies that have blundered into spider webs.
Three cheers for the good folk of Addison County, who weren’t going to let this spectacle keep them away from their beloved culminating Demolition Derby and fireworks. As I put it in a poem about Addison County clay once, the story about clay making men “is true: it does.” But we didn’t have to stop—Irene could retrieve her prizewinner on Sunday—and we didn’t. We went back to Middlebury, maybe or maybe not with our tail between our legs, but certainly with our muffler between our wheels.
The irony of which is, as any long-time Addison County resident knows, there is still time for a drought to turn all those sharp-edged ruts into the sort of material the ancient Mesopotamians used to build ziggurats.
So that’s what happens when possibly the rainiest year on record hits The Great Plains of Vermont. The wicked floods, in Addison County, take place in mountain towns like Bristol, Lincoln and Ripton. Washouts during the past week stranded Ripton by making Route 125—a major state road, not some glorified cow path—impassible both to the east and west.
Whatever else is true about climate change, there’s little doubt that we’ve entered a period of wild swings and unpredictable extremes. I’m old enough to remember the onset: in the late 1970’s, scientists who had reviewed historical records warned that people should not judge what was likely to happen by the unusually steady seasonal patterns since World War II.
Who would have thought that some day we might be nostalgic for the calm, predictable Sixties?
But as Addison County’s example shows, there’s a good side and a bad side to everything. If the Champlain Valley’s silo-studded “Great Plains” were not a former sea and lake bed, they’d be suburbs of Burlington. In the end, the clay is—as those who remember the title of this essay will perhaps have anticipated—a wash.

LILAC IN THE COAL MINE

LILAC IN THE COAL MINE

My wife grew up in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal country, not far from Wilkes-Barre. Tall buildings for coal-crushers dotted the landscape the way silos do in Vermont, and always there seemed to be a runaway coal mine fire somewhere, “deviously wasting and inextinguishable,” as poet W. S. Merwin once put it. Coal smoke was everywhere, too.
Maybe for that reason, she is phenomenally sensitive to particulates. Driving down the highway after a truck has stirred up road salt is a torment. So is sitting next to someone at a concert who is wearing cheap, heavy perfume. When someone smokes, her throat clamps shut, and as she has observed, “When you can’t breathe, nothing else matters very much.” She’s gained a measure of local fame for her saying, “Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.”
Her early warning system is so well-attuned to particulates that sometimes I call her “the canary in the coal mine.” Those who went down those shafts sometimes took a canary in a cage, knowing that if there was a problem with the air, the bird, with its higher metabolic rate and oxygen demand, would show the effects first.
When she moved to Vermont, one of her regrets was that the lilacs she loved so much did not bloom on Mother’s Day the way they always did in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Some observant readers will be wondering here, “What do you mean not blooming on Mother’s Day? That was this past weekend, and lilacs were blooming everywhere.”
That’s the point. Within one person’s lifetime, the season for lilacs has advanced by weeks. The lilacs are, among other things, a “canary in the coal mines”--for global warming.

BOREAL NIGHTS, NORTHERN LIGHTS

BOREAL NIGHTS, NORTHERN LIGHTS

Vermont is just close enough to the boreal region, the northernly area below the arctic, to see aurora borealis, more often called northern lights. Alas, it’s just far enough to the south for big, colorful displays to be rare. That is especially true in years like this, when we are at the point in the sunspot cycle known as the solar minimum.
Sunspots are “cool planet-sized areas on the Sun where intense magnetic loops poke through the star's visible surface.” Though unmentioned by astrologers as far as I know, their bursts of electromagnetic particles cause problems here on Earth, 93 million miles away, for instance by disrupting communications transmissions. The best northern lights I ever saw, so powerful that they were overhead as well as on the horizon and lasted for hours, came on a night when it was impossible to pull in any of the FM radio stations I knew—a tipoff that I should go outside and check the sky. There were a half dozen FM stations on the air, but all of them were speaking Spanish.
There’s a scene in a Vermont novel in which the man wakes his wife because she always wanted to see the northern lights, and somewhat grudgingly she rouses and agrees to be towed along. As they go downstairs, she says, “But it’s almost dawn!” “Honey—that window faces west.” That kind of night.
If seeing the northern lights is part of your life mission as a Vermonter, how would you know they were out there? They don’t make any noise, after all, and most don’t traumatize electronic transmissions, and I don’t know of any newspaper that carries an aurora probability report.
There is one, though, if you go to the Internet site that furnished the above definition of sunspots: www.spaceweather.com. This fabulous resource includes information about many other things than auroras; for instance, on Dec. 1 they had the best picture of Comet Holmes I’ve seen. Every day they publish the Boulder Sunspot Number (there’s also an International Sunspot Number put out by the Sunspot Index Data Center in Belgium). In Spaceweather’s explanation of the numbering systems, they say “As a rule of thumb, if you divide either of the official sunspot numbers by 15, you'll get the approximate number of individual sunspots visible on the solar disk if you look at the Sun by projecting its image on a paper plate with a small telescope.”
On their sunspot timeline from 1610-2000, there are four times since 1950 when the number went above 150. On Dec. 1, it was 12, because a new sunspot, provisionally named 976, was just observed—and had already begun to deteriorate. The website is so thorough that they even have a graphic showing how many sunspots are on the side of the sun facing away from the Earth (none, currently). As I said, it’s not a great year for northern lights. But as sure as shooting stars, there will be a solar maximum as the cycle continues (My memory says it’s an 11-year cycle. Let’s see…”The main periodicity in the Sun's activity is the 11-year cycle called the solar cycle.” No Alzheimer’s yet.)
Spaceweather’s graphics include a representation of the Auroral Oval, the section of the northern hemisphere where auroras are most likely to occur. The map is color-coded, with yellow denoting the fringe areas (like us) and red for the central places (like the Yukon and Hudson’s Bay). The key to it all is one of the three North Poles: the Geomagnetic North Pole, the northern axis of the magnetosphere, the magnetic field that extends from Earth into space. The solar particles hit this set of magnetisms and get funneled toward the North and South Geomagnetic Poles (there are aurora australis, or Southern Lights, too). When they hit the atmosphere, the energy that’s released appears as northern lights.
Since I brought up the subject, I’d better do a quick review of what you may or may not have learned in school about north poles. The Geographic North Pole is the one on maps, used for instance for countries to fight over the oilfields that will become accessible once all the polar ice melts. The Magnetic North Pole is the one your compass points toward; alas for the wisdom of compasses, it has moved 684 miles since it was discovered at 70 degrees N-96 degrees W, and at its current speed of about 25 miles a year could be in Siberia in another half century.
The North Geomagnetic Pole moves, too, but not as much. Currently it’s near Thule (Qaanaaq) in Greenland, about 500 miles east of the Magnetic North Pole.
Getting back to northern lights: for those with a serious interest—photographers, ham radio operators, just dedicated skywatchers—Spaceweather maintains two telephone message services. For $4.95 per month, you get the Space Weather Alert, which will let you know about big sunsports, solar flares, and geomagnetic storms (that is, the stuff that causes northern lights). For $6.95, you get the Backyard Astronomy Alert, which adds things like planetary alignments, meteor showers, and space station fly-bys. If no schools have tapped this resource, perhaps they should, after which those who were interested in northern lights could set up a phone tree. Of course any group of interested individuals could do the same. I’ll bet if enough of us contacted Vermont Public Radio, they’d include a northern lights probability report in their Eye on the Night Sky feature—which is also accessible online.
If you want to search further, www.athropolis.com (all thing arctic) has a set of northern lights links, as well as interesting features like a map of the treeline and reports on current temperatures.
If it seems cold this winter, remember that the northern border of Vermont is at 45 degrees longitude, on a scale that runs from zero to 90. In other words, THE NORTHEAST KINGDOM ISN’T EVEN HALFWAY TO THE NORTH POLE, if you start from the Equator.
As much as to say, it’s a big place up there in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and some big things take place when the stars come out and dance about, as Ronald Reagan’s favorite poet Robert W. Service put it. If you want to see what we’ve been missing down here in the yellow zone of the Auroral Oval, go to Nordly’s Northern Lights, at www.northern-light.no. (The “no” part stands for Norway.) Do it soon, because they appear to have stopped holding monthly aurora photograph contests at the end of 2006, and maybe the archive will disappear as well.
The stuff sent in by the small but highly competitve auroral photographic community includes not only green but also red, yellow, blue and purple northern lights; “coronal” bursts that come from one area of the sky and seem to shower across everything; and more ribbons and flares and other forms than you could imagine. On a frigid-to-the-rigid winter night, logging on to that collection it sure beats watching loose snow blowing off the tops of dune-like drifts.

DEADLEAFSPOTTING

DEADLEAFSPOTTING

Most leaf-peepers pay too much attention to how leaves look and not enough to how they fall.
Yesterday, the wind was blowing hard from the south and our willow tree, a stubborn holdout this fall, was releasing many of its leaves. Some blew so close to the house that they sliced past the kitchen window, headed downward, in a white-streaked way that made me think of the way some fish will strike shiny things that look nothing like baitfish but which have the right flash.
Like such fishing lures, and like the snowflakes that will succeed the leaves, they fell in spirals. Willow leaves are long and thin and not too stiff; while most went down heavy-end first, a few spun like mill wheels, with their spiral-staircase descent taking much longer. Something in the back of my mind said, “You once read that someone won a paper airplane contest with a simple rectangular piece of paper that lasted longest in the air because it fell in exactly such a steamboat-wheel fashion.”
Snowflakes have unique shapes, but also unique ways of settling to the earth. It’s harder to distinguish the differences in most cases, because the event takes place quickly against a white background, but there are times when snowflakes glom together and fall in small number, and at such times it’s easy to see and enjoy the variations in their spirals.
A lot of plants spiral on the way up, too. Do you remember that William Butler Yeats poem that anticipated the two World Wars, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ re full of passionate intensity.” “The Second Coming” begins with the words, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” “Gyre” was for Yeats a synonym for “spiral;
he was fascinated by spirals, considering them a key to the progressions of history. Our personal growth was like going up a spiral staircase, he thought: we go over and over the same ground, but each time gaining from what we have learned. These latter days, of course, we may be more inclined to think of William Carlos Williams’ “The descent beckons/ As the ascent beckoned.”
Not only do falling things descend in spirals, and not only is each spiral slightly different from the others, they differ in ways that can be arranged according to the Law of Large Numbers. Of all the laws under which we live, this is perhaps the most pervasive and powerful, and the most mysterious: it says that enough repetitions of the same phenomenon will fall into a distribution that can be described with “the bell curve.” We are most familiar with the application of this to the results of intelligence tests: a handful will score very, very highly; a few will have very high scores; more will have high scores; most will be in the middle of the pack; and the lower scores will thin out as they approach the lowest scores.
ANYTHING can be described by the Law of Large Numbers. But how? And why? To put it another way, even the more prosaic and seemingly obvious aspect of existence in this universe is at the same time spooky as all hell. Around All Souls and All Saints Days, when summer’s mad rush is done and fall’s dismantling is almost over and things hold still, they start to look strange.
They are. But only if you see them as things, says the Zen Buddhist.

SLINGS AND ARROWS

SLINGS AND ARROWS

For the 12th year, the Chimney Point State Historic Site in Addison will host the Northeast Annual Open Atlatl Championship competition (Sept. 14-16), and ace atlatl titleist Robert Berg will lead a workshop at which participants will make their own atlatls and fletch three field darts. As part of Vermont Archaeology Month, people will engage in a Stone Age activity next to the huge iron bridge over Lake Champlain.
So, what’s an atlatl, something from Mad Magazine? No, that’s the axolotl, a lizard of the high mountain lakes in Mexico, found in the territory the Nahuatl once ruled, hence the –tl ending. An atlatl, also from the Nahuatl, is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a device for throwing a spear or dart that consists of a rod or board with a projection (as a hook) at the rear end to hold the weapon in place until released.”
In other words, the atlatl is a way of throwing a sharp-pointed, spearlike object as if your arm were longer, giving you more range. It takes practice to master the sweeping motion needed to send the projectile accurately, but in its day this was a formidable hunting implement.
One of my fascinations has been the way similar extensions of human strength were developed all over the world during the earliest ages of human society, in so many different ways. South American had the bolo, three weights on three ropes connected at the middle so that when thrown whirling at an ostrich’s legs, it would tangle them up. American tribes sometimes used the rabbit stick, a simple length of wood thrown parallel with and just above the ground, so that its faster outer whirling part would knock out a small animal looking over the grass. The spear used the mass and momentum of its heavy length to drive home the relatively crude stone points of the Neolithic. Some jungle tribes used the blow tube, after they learned how poisonous some things around them were, meaning that a small wound from a small dart could be made fatal. Various snares and possibly devices similar to the Malaysian Gate (ask a Vietnam veteran) took on added force from the controlled release of bent vegetation. The Middle East had the sling, swung in a circle to throw a rock with increased speed and terrific effect, as gigantic Goliath discovered when confronting the Hebrew shepherd boy David. The bow and arrow were so effective that the invention diffused widely, or occurred independently in many places. Top prize ought to go to Australia’s aboriginals, whose boomerangs, aerodynamically shaped rabbit sticks, would circle back to the thrower if they missed their target—thus utilizing the basic principle behind flight long before people could ever take off from the ground themselves.
So began our long history of warfare, with war against other animals.
To complete the prehistoric picture, one more invention needs to be recognized: rope. Maybe the idea came from women’s invention of thread, as a way of putting together garments and shelters. Maybe observation of vines and their twisted and twisting growth habits gave someone the idea. Maybe unkempt hair, which tends to clump naturally into coils like the Rastafarians’ “dreadlocks.” In any case, people were soon twisting flexible materials into better and better cordage, which had all sorts of uses (the bow, a musical instrument as well as a weapon, depended on such an invention).
It was rope that enabled one group of people to make captives of some other group, rather than having to kill them. It was the kind of rope known as a whip that make such captives slaves. And “civilization,” like it or not, was born of enslavements, just as our modern civilization began with the arrival of machinery.

Brickbats, bolts and blunderbussings can be sent to [email protected].

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 [email protected]

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.

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