WHAT NEXT?

The vice-presidential debates last week touched upon the country's energy future. I was disappointed that Sarah Palin reacted to Joe Biden's dismissal of "drill, drill, drill" with a correction. "No, Joe, it's drill baby, drill!" I was hoping to hear a more substantive discussion of what might happen over the next four to eight years to get us moving toward the new technologies.
The first picture is a scanned postcard that shows a portion of the Mahoning River Valley as it looked when I was a kid in Youngstown, Ohio (click on it for a zoomed view). On overcast nights, the underbelly of the clouds would flicker with an orange glow from these and other steel mill stacks and furnaces. Water from the river was used to quench the hot steel. The air was pretty bad, but people said that the fumes and soot were a sign of good times: everybody working. My Dad and Granddad jockeyed locomotives in and between the mills and freight depots. In the late seventies, the mills began to go away and now the stacks are gone and there is loose talk of what to do with the river, again showing signs of life (though the bottom has several feet of toxic sediment). Some of us would like to see it restored to a truly live river fit for fishing and paddling. Northeast Ohio may be in the heart of the rust-belt, but we have tremendous water supplies (even though many are too polluted to bear their full potential) and beautiful, still fertile countryside in between the expanse of urban sprawl.
The second picture shows solar panels arrayed over a parking area and the third is obviously a cluster of windmills (these are not located in Ohio). The steel mills are never coming back to northeast Ohio, but I wonder what we're waiting for (as a country) to convert our power grid. Think of all the roof space atop malls, strip plazas, parking decks, schools, and factories that could support solar panels. Here in one of the cloudier regions, we will need combinations of new technology and energy efficiencies. As a family, we drive a little less and favor the hybrid that gets 50 mpg over the vehicle that averages 20 mpg. I have a feeling we are all going to be making much bigger adjustments in the near term.
I try to imagine what our towns and countryside will look like twenty years from now. I am optimistic, because we have no choice but to change.
(postcard compliments of Kelly Bancroft)

Lumberjacking Update

So Dave and I got the tree down, limbed, sawed and stacked as well as a couple of smaller ones that were dead wood. The reward for our work was a feast of a lunch, fit for lumberjacks. The biggest reward was doing this kind of work without an accident: careful, under control. At one point we needed to roll the better part of the trunk up onto some cut pieces to get it off the ground so our saws weren't going in the dirt at the end of the cut. A couple of metal bars for levers did the trick. Above is the pictorial evidence.

Lumberjacking

Here are two views of a tree that a friend and I are going to take down tomorrow (Dave Materna–he's a teacher, writer and musician, not a lumberjack). My wife and I live in the middle of a couple of acres of woods. You might think that means it's maintenance free–not so. Over the years we have lived here, we have had several windblown or lightning struck trees down, often across the drive. A couple of ice storms cost us many trees and parts of trees including a fairly big hickory that fell on our deck. Sometimes I take care of it all with my chain saw and other times have to call in professionals. One tree within twenty feet of our house required a crane for safe removal. This particular tree up and died for reasons of its own and I need to get it down before the weather topples it at an inopportune time (like when I am walking out to the road for the paper or mail). We leave many dead trees away from the house or drive alone for the benefit of the woodpeckers. If you click on the picture of the trunk (right), you will see big holes in the other trunk to the left. Those are the result of a pileated woodpecker harvesting ants. Pileateds are as big as crows–quite spectacular (picture above). Dave and I will tackle this one and a couple of others tomorrow. The challenge will be having them fall in the preferred direction and then cutting them into firewood-size chunks that will be stacked. The branches will form a huge pile and I'll need to rent a major league chipper later to turn them into mulch. So, I'll let you know how it goes.

Tree Trouble

CLICK TO ENLARGE THE HOUSE PHOTO
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a three day writing conference in Cuyahoga Valley National Park called the Language of Nature. It was sponsored by the Environmental Education Council of Ohio. We stayed at the Stanford Hostel, a really cool farmhouse built in about 1830, restored and converted to the Hostel in the 1980's. The weather for this event was hot and humid and on the second evening a cool front blew in while we were getting ready for dinner. The leading edge of the storm was rather typical. It got dark rather suddenly and an initial burst of wind heralded the storm. The gusts were probably in the range of 40 to 50 mph or so, very common around here. What was unusual was that those of us who happened to be watching the storm approach through the front windows suddenly saw the better part of a TREE coming at the house. My first thought was TORNADO. Just as I was about to hit the deck, I realized that if I was still standing and the house was still standing, it was not a tornado. This moment was shared by a buddy of mine who was an instructor in the program, Dawson. The tree, pictured above, was simply waiting for the right angle of wind to complete a trimming. The huge maple with a divided trunk had been attacked at its core by insects and the longstanding process completed itself in this particular storm. The top grazed the house and casused some damage. A woman had been sitting on a bunk in the corner room and it would have been worse had the tree made a more direct hit. As you can see, the forked trunk neatly framed the corner of the house with this minor damage instead of a catastrophe had it been a direct hit. We enjoyed our dinner by lantern, went for a hike in the fresh aftermath of the storm at a ledges area and did some outdoor writing. My journal has a few splotched pages from occasional drops from the still wet trees. The Institute was a great way to spend a few hot Ohio days: enjoying the Park, the wildlife, the scenery and the company of educators concerned about environmental ethics.

Last Days With Lucky

I have written earlier here about Lucky, the rescued cat whose name tells his story. He was a very integral part of our family for the last 14 years. Cats are very spartan and vets often miss the diagnosis. We tried to rescue Lucky again when he suddenly decided to eat tiny portions and wasted his body weight in half over a few weeks. The vet was confounded and just said he was an old guy. Linda fed him with a syringe for several weeks and during that time, despite his spiral toward the feline heaven, he maintained his personality and congeniality. This is him taking a nap on my back while I took a snooze on my favorite nap place: the floor in front of the computer. He's frail and gray here but still engaged with his role as part of the family. Shortly after this, he took his last breath. He was a wonderful cat and we still see him in some of his favorite places.

Osprey at Nimi

This nesting osprey is one among the pairs at Nimisilla Reservoir (the southern most of the Portage Lakes south of Akron). Click on it to enlarge. It's a beautiful bird. I snapped it from my kayak as the stiff NW wind was pushing me toward the nest closer than I wanted. The bird flapped off just after this shot. It's a spectacular sight to see them drop into the water to capture fish. Years ago, while windsurfing there, we saw lone birds fishing once in awhile. For the last several years, they have returned for nesting. A few minutes after taking this picture, I rolled my boat (unintentionally). Fortunately, my camera was in a sealed bag. I had to make a decision whether, after righting the kayak, to deploy an oar float and climb in (difficult) and then pump the gallons of water out with a small pump or swim the boat to shore. I was a quarter mile or so off shore and decided to swim it. Filled with water, it felt like a barge and when i finally hauled it out, I felt like I had run a 10k.