August

August was named for Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, who lived from 63 B.C to A.D 14.  Much of the month is included in the dog days of summer, when the hottest days typically occur, when dogs and men alike tend to go mad from the heat.  It’s a big month for vacationing, for home canning, for swimming in lakes when water temperatures are at a seasonal high.  It’s a month when warm, humid nights are alive with the drone of cicadas, katydids and crickets, when summer, though still firmly engaged, begins to show evidence of submission.

Bird migration has begun, and almost daily we see swifts, swallows and martins winging their way south in loose groups.  The orioles have left, shorebirds are on the move, grackles and blackbirds gather in fall flocks.  Restless.  Flighty.

In the garden, ripened sunflower seeds are picked clean by goldfinches.  Overripe tomatoes plop to the ground.  Potato vines wither. Butterflies and hummingbirds stock up on nectar from zinnias at the garden edge.  Three months ago we were dropping seeds in the ground, and today the freezer and pantry are full to bursting.  

In spring it’s easy to take notice of toothworts and Dutchman’s breeches and bloodroot.  Spring flowers garner worthy attention as they light up forest floors awakened from winter dormancy.  The flowers of late summer are no less varied, abundant, and impressive but many aren’t fussed over so much, perhaps because things green and growing have become routine and we’ve stopped looking.  We can’t help but notice field thistles and goldenrods and giant sunflowers, but the less obvious knotweeds, skullcaps, bugleweeds, willowherbs, snakeroots, and nearly endless others, are often met with little more than a casual glance.

Maybe it’s anticipation. We look forward to spring wildflowers as indicators of a new season, a clean slate.  By the time August rolls around we’re caught in the summer doldrums, hardened by heat and a sea of green, and maybe not so thrilled by yet another flower, especially if it doesn’t stand out.

But summer is ebbing.  It shows in the walnuts that litter the woodland trail, in the stickseed entangled in the dog’s fur. It’s there in the sound of hickory nuts banging off the metal roof of the pole barn.  And soon a spell of hot weather will be short-lived and the nights will be cooler and we’ll rummage through dressers for sweatshirts and socks. The fields will brown, the trees will take on new color, and the night insects will grow quiet.  Frost is still weeks away but its promise is shown in August.

Our two sons are somewhere high in the sierras, carrying their provisions on their backs.  They are hiking across one hundred million year old granite, following waterways at 10,000 ft and higher, exploring the western backbone of the US, a place naturalist John Muir called the Range of Light.  Knowing them as I do, the boys will not be blind to the details they encounter, and they’ll view that spectacular alpine country through eyes that recognize how fragile and vulnerable it is.  All around them the fires burn, the land dries, the drought intensifies.  The worst of the California fire season typically comes in September and October, but already there are over 800 more fires burning a million acres beyond the average for this time of year.  California, and other many western states, are breaking long held norms.

August falls in hurricane season and a mean storm has struck Louisiana.  The region braces for 150 mph winds and intense flooding.

In comparison, those of us in the Midwest are fairing pretty well.  There are areas that could use rain and others that have had too much.  It’s hot, and right now that’s about all the weather drama we can muster.  There’s plenty of other drama, of course, plenty to get worked up over, much of it beyond our control.  

Paraphrasing a post from Wyoming resident John Roedel, we live on a spinning wet rock next to a constantly exploding fireball in the middle of an ever-expanding universe filled with mysteries beyond our wildest imagination. We’re hurtling through the great expanse with billions of people who have free-will and whose own experiences shape their perspectives and beliefs. And while this is going on our souls are residing in a physical body, a miracle of delicate engineering, which at any given moment could produce its last heartbeat. So, what is it we think we control?

There is an abundance of small but dramatic August flowers blooming.  Look for them.

Rational Conclusions

 

A woman who was a classmate through grade and high school is now one of hundreds of thousands who have died of Coronavirus. Maybe she had made every effort to avoid the virus and was simply an unfortunate victim, or maybe she was confused by misinformation surrounding the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.  Regardless, her perpetual smile is gone, and a life fueled by hope and marked by kindness is no more. 

The debate over mask mandates continues and is now an embarrassing political game. If ever we have strained at gnats and swallowed camels it is now, as we bemoan a minor inconvenience in favor of  a far greater threat. An op ed written by a 14 year old Florida Parkland student says it perfectly: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/guest-commentary/os-op-schools-masks-keep-politics-out-20210811-tl2qby2b3bgybivv2boe26ylji-story.html. 

I read that tourist businesses on Lake Powell are being threatened by the mega drought.  Some feel the national parks service is to blame with its failure to extend boat launch ramps to reach receding water levels.  “They (the NPS) are allowing a beautiful, beautiful place to fall apart.” The man with the grievance made no mention of climate change or the ramifications of not having water for hydroelectric power or irrigation or people, but rather stuck to the problem of launching a houseboat without a suitable ramp.

The other night there was a small gathering at the Black Dog Tavern to wish a local couple bon voyage as they prepare to embark on a new life in the North Carolina mountains.  There were only eight of us, and it was one of very few gatherings my wife and I had attended since COVID reared its ugly face.   It was also, I soon realized, the first time in nearly two years that I was at a table with a group of politically identical folks, and it was incredibly refreshing. It is one thing to feel connected to an online commentator and quite another to be at a table of peers carved from the same log. 

With the shroud of American presence removed in Afghanistan, the Taliban are resuming their conquest and are wasting no time at it.  How hopeful they must feel to be free of constraints in forcing their beliefs on the Afghan people.  They have persevered and are reaping, in their minds, a just reward.

We recently listened to an NPR Science Friday report on orca whales.  It’s long been known that orcas have strong and permanent family units.  The old matriarchs, with their long life experiences, will lead the pod to known sources of food in times of scarcity.  It’s also known they mourn the loss of members.  In one documented case, a mother carried its dead newborn a thousand miles before the corpse was dropped or literally disintegrated.  The pods around Puget Sound rely on chinook salmon for food, and the chinook are disappearing as a result of human activities.  Orcas are not the only mammal that values chinook, and efforts to bring them back carry with them a cascade of environmental benefits.

There was an article in the New Yorker on why it is so hard to be rational, and it made me think of the rational people I know and how well it has served them and how the world might benefit from a wave of rational thinking.  We are bombarded with news and endless opinions, and it is easy to get swept up by emotion and half truths or falsehoods and to turn a blind eye toward rational conclusions.  I came across a 

social media post from a pastor in upper Michigan: “Our minds are easily influenced, but we control what the influences are.  Choose wisely.”

August is waning.  Areas of the garden that grew sweetcorn and onions and cucumbers are ready for winter cover crop.  There was a heavy fog this morning and the nests of fall webworms, particularly common this year, were heavy with water droplets and glowing a soft white.  In the woodlot the white snakeroot is blooming, as is blue cardinal flower and wingstem and others that mark the last weeks of summer.  The forecast calls for hot and dry weather.  Parts of Tennessee received more than 14 inches of rain in just a few hours, causing incredible damage and loss of life.  A tropical system brought in moisture which accumulated in an ever warming atmosphere and resulted in an atmospheric river that emptied on central Tennessee. Physics in action.  No rational thought required.

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Rhubarb Pie to Revive a Guy

In the pond, a few bluegills spared by the otters built nests this summer.  Each nest can hold 6000-18000 eggs, and they face grave danger from the outset, with less than one half of one percent resulting in fish that die of old age.  Thirty out of every 6000.

The capacity of the earth to replenish itself is impressive.  Many species low on the food chain produce massive numbers of offspring.  Among insects, the cabbage aphid may be the champion.  Under perfect conditions a single female could, in one year’s time, spawn enough descendants to cover the earth to a depth of 90 miles!  But since perfect conditions don’t exist, most aphids are quickly lost to predation by birds and other insects.   Generally, larger animals have fewer young, but there are exceptions. Female ocean sunfish weighing up to two tons can release 300 million eggs at a time, but most never get fertilized or are eaten by foraging fishes. Everything’s connected, seeking balance, beautifully functional.

We grow cucumbers on trellises, A-frames made of four foot wire panels.  This year we had two trellises three feet apart, each holding eight plants.   We pick cukes when they’re small and bristly, prime for pickling, and this year’s crop has been good.  There are 65 pints of pickles in the pantry, refrigerator dills for good measure, and we’ve given away over 100 pounds of surplus.  The space between trellises is filled with vines that extend into the yard and are growing up adjacent tomato cages and threatening to cover pepper plants and anything else that gets in their way.

Like all living things, a cucumber plant is driven to procreate.  Removing small cukes with their immature seeds spurs the plant to produce more fruit, not unlike stealing eggs from a laying hen.  The push to procreate and replicate is strong and mutations are part of the process, which helps explain the Delta variant.  With more than half the world unvaccinated the virus has a great playground where it experiments on cooperative and willing hosts.

In spite of my best efforts there are cucumbers I miss and they grow large and yellow and are filled with mature seeds so the plant succeeds in its objective.  Nature always wins.  We’re just players in her orchestra who sometimes pretend to be smarter and more capable.  We develop poisons to kill weeds, she develops super weeds, immune to our chemicals.  We abuse soil, she washes or blows it away.  We remove key components from established ecosystems, she removes services we deem essential.  We overpopulate and abuse land and lay resources to waste, she will ultimately thin us out like so many aphids.  Her checks and balances are finely tuned and not open to compromise.

The earth constantly regenerates resources and ecological services but every year we’re using more than can be replaced.  This year, we used our annual allotment on July 29th, so from here on out we’re in the red.  The date is known as Earth Overshoot Day and in recent history has been occurring in July.  In 2020, the influence of the pandemic moved the date back by a month to August 22, still four months shy of where we need to be.

My wife had a birthday recently and her request was a rhubarb pie. I made her one using my mom’s hand written, lard-heavy pie crust recipe and rhubarb from the freezer.  It turned out superb, if I do say so myself.  We ate a piece right after Lee summarized the news of the day: cattle starving and being sold months early due to drought, sweet onions in the NW completely destroyed by intense heat, California fighting its third largest fire in history, scientists becoming increasingly alarmed over changes in the Gulf Stream.  I was reminded of a little ditty Garrison Keillor did on his Prairie Home Companion radio show: Beebopareebop rhubarb pie.  “One little thing can revive a guy, and that’s a piece of rhubarb pie.  Serve it up, nice and hot, maybe things aren’t as bad as you thought.”  And for just a little while, they weren’t.