Asakiyume mita

Went on a bike ride with Waka in the sensual hot 'n' humid, where you really feel each patch of shade, like you're diving into cold water, and then into the heat again, and in all these places, so many smells--the smell of baking soil, of flowers and black raspberries and pine needles, also the smell of creosote by the train tracks, and the smell of swampy still water, and here and there the smell of garbage cooking in the sun.

We passed a father having a picnic with his daughter out the shaded door to their ground-floor apartment. There was a blanket: dad was sitting on this, very still--I thought he was meditating at first--and there were many small bowls of things to eat. On the threshold of the door was the daughter, three or four, with wild curly reddish brown hair, not quite ready maybe to be lured out.

This dramatic wildflower turns out to be butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa). How pretty!



And on the trip, there was some underpass art...





The other side was a celebration of bees and beekeeping:



Also on the ride, a trailside water tap, where you could get a drink of water, and air pump, in case your tires were low, courtesy of a car dealer; also a scrapyard with the cars almost lost in wildflowers and tall grass.

Song sparrows, catbirds, and swifts were all singing out. At the place we stopped to buy a drink and a bite to eat, the woman behind the counter had a tattoo of utility polls and the swooping wires strung between them, with birds on them.

I was at an informational event on sanctuary cities and the Massachusetts Safe Communities Act this afternoon, and before it started, I was chatting with Cliff McCarthy, a wonderful local historian (I've shared one of his other stories in the past--a tale of poverty, murder, and arson). This time he told me the extremely dramatic story of Angeline Palmer, a free child of color "hired out" by the town of Amherst (Angeline was an orphan and ward of the town) to work for the Shaw family in Belchertown in the late 1830s. "Right in that house over there," Cliff said, pointing out the window to the house next door to where our event was happening.

You can read the full story at Freedom Stories of the Pioneer Valley, Cliff's history website, but here is the outline--and some highlights. Mason Shaw, known as "Squire Shaw," had gotten swept up in western Massachusetts' "mulberry craze"--he was investing in mulberry trees, with the hopes of making a fortune in the silk industry. He was also trying to *sell* mulberry trees--in 1840, he traveled to Georgia to try to interest farmers there in buying them. While there, he sent a letter to his wife, telling her to bring twelve-year-old Angeline south, where Shaw reckoned he could sell her for $600.

( will Angeline be sold into slavery?? )

The story was so dramatic, so empowering, and--at least briefly--had a happy ending. There are no pictures of Angeline! I wish there were--as it is, we'll just have to imagine her. Visit Cliff's page on Angeline to see a sketch of Henry Jackson and a photo of the house from which Angeline was rescued.

I've started volunteering--just a little bit--helping high school kids with essay writing, both at my town's high school and in a troubled school district nearby. The kids at my local high school are relatively privileged (but still so various--one told me about moving from Maine, another about his Soundcloud page, another about being the child of Indian immigrants), the other are in a program for kids struggling to graduate for one reason or another.

That second bunch of kids--I love them so much already. They've picked some excellent research topics. One wanted to write about how miscarriages affect fathers (his girlfriend had a miscarriage). Another wanted to write about school lunches. Another, with Tourettes, wanted to write about Tourettes. Another wanted to write about the effect of cellphones and other electronics on kids in elementary school.

I want these kids to have the same chances that the kids at my local school have. They have so much good stuff to share with the world.

Here's the mighty Connecticut River. Just across it, over there, is where those kids go to school. See the water spurting and pluming through the dam? The city generates electricity from that.



Here are geese in the shoals.



And here's the view further down the river--well, two weekends ago. Most leaves have fallen now.

>

Here is graffiti under a bridge that crosses the river. Do you see the "RIP" on a piece of wood in the foreground? The dates were 1993 to 2016. My younger daughter's age.



Wake up, this graffito tells us. Are you sufficiently awake?

On Monday, I was out for a morning run, not very far from home, when I came upon a possum that had been hit by a car. I was passing it, when I heard a wheezing, hissing, chirping sort of noise, and saw a little, blind, baby possum, with just a shadow of gray fuzz on its body, struggling by the side of the road. It had either been thrown there or had somehow managed to creep its way over. And then I saw that there was another, a little way off.

Those babies were in a desperate state, and trying so hard to stay alive.

So, I ran back home and came back in a car with a box. I picked up the two babies, looked for others, but didn't see any others that were alive. At home I wrapped a hot water bottle in a towel while wakanomori looked for wildlife rehabilitators that we could call. (yamamanama, you can bet I was thinking of you, but the place you volunteer at would be like two hours away, so I figured I'd try something closer.) Meanwhile those little babies were cheeping and wheezing away.

For those of you in Massachusetts, this page offers regional pages you can check out for this purpose. (For those of you not in Massachusetts, your state may have similar, or you can simply search on "wildlife rehabilitator.") Waka printed out the page for the Pioneer Valley, and I started calling.

It was still pretty early in the morning and no one was picking up. I left several messages, and at last got one woman, a vet, but she said that baby possums were difficult because they required tube feeding, and that she couldn't do it because she was traveling. She urged me to keep trying other numbers. At last I reached Medicine Mammals. The woman there told me she had a different method for feeding baby possums (involving a toothbrush--I guess they suck the bristles), and that she would take them.

She lives at the end of a dirt road, and the scene behind her house reminded me of Medwyn's Valley, for those of you who've read Taran Wanderer. When I opened the box to show her the possums, we saw that the two babies had made their way next to each other and were snuggled together.

After I turned them over to her and made a donation for her work, she invited me to come to the Pocumtuck Homelands Festival. "We'll have our tipi up and there'll be storytelling," she said. I was thinking, tipi?? The Native Americans in this area never made tipis. But it turns out she's Apache, so that explains it.

When I got home, I got a call from my town's Animal Control Officer. "Did you rescue some baby possums from George Hannum Road?" she asked. "Yes," I said, flabbergasted, because I hadn't called her, so how could she know? "Well, we removed the mother and there were other babies alive in her pouch, and I was wondering if you'd found a rehabilitator?" She must have been calling the same people I'd been calling, and they must have said that someone else from B-town was also calling about baby possums.

So I was able to tell her about Medicine Mammals, so maybe more of those sibling possums will make it.

The guys who oversee the town transfer station (aka the town dump, but some stuff does get transferred for recycling) keep warm in a tiny room attached to the big pit where the nonrecyclable trash gets tossed. You go in there to buy town trash bags or to renew the sticker for your car that lets you go there. Inside, a TV is often on, and, at this time of year, there's a three-bar heater running.

There are two guys there: one is in his sixties and the other is in his thirties. I was renewing my car sticker, which meant showing my registration. "Oh, you live in Drowned Woods.¹ I always get lost driving there," the young guy says. "You know," says the older guy, "I used to go hunting up there, before it was developed. I knew every twist and turn, every stone and tree. But not now."

And then we got to talking, and he told some awesome stories about the town, 50 years ago. When he was little, a grand house that's now down the hill from the town common was right on the common. (It was bought for a dollar and moved to its present location in two halves, for $30,000. Now it's apartments.)

( the two-headed calf )

He went on to speculate that they must have belonged to the women's now-deceased husbands or sons. Sure, that's what it must have been ;-)

I asked him about a building that's falling down by the railroad tracks where I used to tap maple trees.

( a blacksmith )

Getting to hear town history from an old-timer is so wonderful.

¹Not its real name. The development is named after one of the drowned Quabbin towns.

My neck of the woods turns out to be one of the best places in the United States to see dinosaur footprints. Not bones, but footprints. Who knew?! But it's true. I've known for years that there was a rather idiosyncratic, privately run place nearby ("Nash Dinosaur Tracks") where one can see dinosaur tracks, but I'd never been. But this weekend, wakanomori and I went there, and it was fabulous.

The back entrance to Nash Dinosaur Tracks, which was the way we ended up entering





Kornell Nash, the current curator, is the son of Carlton Nash, who bought the site in 1939 and ran it until his death in 1997. He told us that a farm boy with the magnificent name of Pliny Moody found the first dinosaur tracks in 1802. He brought them home for a doorstep to his family home,¹ and then when he went off to school, he sold them to a doctor, Elihu Dwight, who told the neighborhood children that they were the tracks left by Noah's raven when he was sent out to look for land after the flood (Noah's raven must have been much larger than the ravens we have nowadays... an antediluvian raven).

Mr. Nash, telling us the story of Pliny Moody, Elihu Dwight, and Noah's raven


The footprints of Noah's raven (source)


Dinosaur tracks on display


Mr. Nash's father grew up near the Moody homestead and was fascinated with dinosaurs. In 1933, a year out of high school, he discovered some tracks while prospecting. In 1939, he bought the land he'd found them on. After we talked for a while longer, Mr. Nash let us wander out in the quarry area where to this day he cuts out tracks--and not only tracks: also fossilized fish and wood.

In the quarry


A track in situ


This painting, at the front of the establishment, was painted by an enterprising Hampshire College student who came calling, asking if she could do some painting for him. The website has a page devoted to past signs and paintings here--they're quite fun.



(There are more photos from our visit here.)

Mr. Nash also knew lots about local history, including about a beautiful mill building we had passed on our way over--but I'll save pictures of that for a separate entry.

¹Paving your walk with dinosaur tracks was apparently all the rage for a while. Wistariahurst, a stately home in Holyoke that was built by the Skinner family, who were silk and satin manufacturers, paved their driveway with them:

Photo by Bill DeGiulio (source)

Behind this grand old mill building is the Mill River, which teenybuffalo took me to several years ago.



Little Springtime, the healing angel, and I went down to the very spot she had shown me (and, actually, the healing angel was along on that trip too), but really what we wanted to get to was a sandy island a bit upstream. The problem was that there was a waterfall between us and upriver at this point.

The healing angel hopped quite nimbly across the river and signaled to us, after a time, that we would find a place to scramble down on our side if we walked back along the highway a bit.

We walked back up the highway, and sure enough, did find a place to scramble down to the water.

Here is the healing angel, already on the island we want to get to.


( a few more photos )

I had to return a completed job by post this morning. While I was filling out a form, the door opened and there was an amazing sound of CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP emanating from a cardboard box, marked "live chicks" and with sides punctuated with air holes and with hay sticking out from those holes.

"The beats are the heart of the party," the person carrying this box was saying into his bluetooth. He set the box down on the counter and left.

CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP! said those live chicks.

"Ed's called twice already, wondering where his chicks are," said J.

"Well, you can tell him they've arrived," said T.

I asked about chick delivery, and T told me that they have go overnight. Those chicks came from Iowa.

. . . Did you know that East Timor has no government-run, nationwide postal system?

They have internet and wifi. The East Timor Action Network just today reported that Timor Telecom is offering computers to schools and universities in Timor-Leste (East Timor), "to contribute to the digital inclusion of students and create a new approach to teaching." But if I want to get a computer to someone in Timor-Leste--say someone in the town of Ainaro--I either have to bring it myself or give it to someone who's going over, who then has to hand deliver it or entrust it to someone to deliver. If I make friends with anyone in Ainaro while I'm over there, I can send them emails or phone them, but I can't send them a letter, not directly to their home.

My contact tells me that within the town of Ainaro there's mail delivery that's carried out by the district administration, and maybe the same thing happens in other districts, and in the capital of Dili. But if you're in Dili and you want to get something to Ainaro, you have to arrange something with a bus driver or someone else who will play courier.

This is one way (one of many ways) in which Timor-Leste is different from the fictional nation of W-- in my Pen Pal novel. W-- has a postal service.

I'm very slowly making my way through King Spruce, the 1908 novel that I found by the side of the road. Among other things, it very earnestly teaches the reader about the state of the logging and timber industry in Maine at the turn of the century, and among the details are mention of clans of ne'er-do-wells--portrayed the way gypsies or hillbilly moonshiners might be portrayed, if the setting were elsewhere--who squat on the land and are periodically forcibly resettled by the lumber barons. The lumber barons hate these folks because of their habit of setting fires to encourage blueberry bushes to produce:

There she lays before you, ten thousand acres like a tinder-box in this weather, dry since middle August. You've seen some of the slash. But you've seen only a little of it. Under those trees as far as eye can see there's the slash of tree cuttin's. Tops propped on their boughs like wood in a fireplace. Draught like a furnace! ... And about all those dod-fired Diggers down there know or care about property interests is that a burn makes blueberries grow, and blueberries are worth six cents a quart! They have done it in other places. They're inbred till they've got water for blood and sponges for brains. When the hankerin' for blueberries catches 'em they'll put the torch to that undergrowth and refuse, and if the wind helps and the rain don't stop it they'll set a fire that will run to Pogey Notch like racin' hosses.
--Holman Day King Spruce (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908), page 86

Fascinating for the power dynamic and the competing interests.

And I've also been listening to some of Jean Ritchie's folksongs, and came across this gem, "Lazy John"

Lazy John, Lazy John
Will you marry me?

How can I marry you?
No hat to wear

Up she jumped and away she ran
Down to the market square
There she found a hat
For Lazy John to wear...

He continues to raise sartorially related objections: namely, he has no shirt, no trousers, no socks, and no shoes, and our lovestruck young woman, who enjoys a trip to the market square as much as the next person and can't, apparently, see the pattern being established (else she could forestall the socks and shoes by getting them when she picked up the trousers), goes and buys him each thing.

Finally she asks,

Lazy John, Lazy John
Will you marry me?

To which he replies--with surely heartfelt sadness....

How can I marry you
With a wife and ten children at home?

I suspect he's off to light the mountainside next, so he can set his ten children to picking blueberries come spring.