A More Certain Future

There’s a heavy mist rising from the pond this morning. A pair of geese, barely visible, send ripples across the surface. The northern hemisphere tilts toward the season of dormancy. Meteorological fall has begun. 

It’s 40 degrees, and a 64 degree house feels cooler than when the outdoor temperature is, say, 60. I don’t understand why. Late in the afternoon we take a bike ride into a stiff north wind and quickly learn we are underdressed.  The road exits the woods and enters a protected sunny stretch, and without thinking our pedaling slows and we take in the warmth.

Corn harvest has begun. We flush a group of five pheasants huddled roadside, the first we’ve seen here in years. Crop fields are not ideal habitat but offer some benefit, especially when no-till practices or cover crops are used. As seasonal grain harvest ramps up the effect is not unlike a forest fire— suddenly millions of acres of cover and travel corridors disappear, and wild residents are forced into new routines. Predators take note. 

In the news this week the CEO of Chase Bank said the bank will continue to provide loans to the oil and gas industry because not doing so would put America “on the road to hell.”  The four biggest US banks: Chase, CitiBank, Bank of America, and Wells-Fargo are the world’s largest lenders to the fossil fuel industry. According to an article by Bill McKibben from The Crucial Years, these same banks also continue to make loans to Russia and its fossil fuel efforts, effectively supporting the war against Ukraine. That means every time we swipe our CitiBank card we’re supporting Russia and Big Oil. It won’t be swiped again. We have options. We all do. 

The Chase CEO said the world needs to produce 100 million barrels of oil per day over the next decade, which is an increase over current production and blows a hole in President Biden’s plan to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030. A year ago the four big banks signed onto the Global Alliance for Net Zero, an organized effort to wean lenders away from the oil industry, but now they’re threatening to back out, claiming “legal reasons.”

We subscribe to a local online meteorologist who backs up his forecasts with explanations I appreciate.  In recent years he’s made several references to events that were particularly rare and unexpected, sometimes destructive.

A study published in ScienceDaily says that as the temperature difference between the North Pole and equator lessens, the ability for forecasters to accurately predict weather, particularly flooding events, becomes more challenging. The atmosphere is behaving differently, and the models used to predict weather are becoming outdated. 

Meteorologists are quick to mention when they get a forecast correct but can be tight lipped when they don’t.  A couple years back I sent my weatherman an email suggesting he mention climate change when, say, a “chance of rain” becomes a flooding event. It might help him save face while doing his part in keeping an existential threat in the public’s eye. He responded saying the topic was politically charged and he had inclinations to steer clear, but agreed it was something he needed to do. He hasn’t. 

In a few days September will pass the reins to October. Our weatherman suggests peak leaf color and first frost dates could be delayed.  The planet is getting hotter and drier and wetter all at once. Big banks, and virtually everyone alive, continue to support an industry which ensures a climatic shift back to a world where no man ever lived.  

We’ve started watching the Ken Burns series on PBS: The US and the Holocaust. The longer I live the more I realize how frequently I must have dozed off in high school history. I didn’t know that Hitler drew inspiration from what he observed in the US.  Our forced sterilization practices, our treatment of native Americans and slaves, the support shown for improving the gene pool, all intrigued the fledgling German leader. I didn’t know that many of his countrymen opposed their commander and assumed his aspirations would be short lived or controlled by reasonable people close to him. I didn’t realize how restrictive our borders were towards accepting Jews desperate to leave Europe. Most unsettling are the parallels that can be drawn between the rise of a crazed dictator in 1930’s Germany and the current state of affairs in the US.  We can be a complicated and frustrating lot, set in our ways, easily drawn to conspiracy, blinded by deep rooted racial prejudice or religious intolerance. 

I get it. A good part of my life was oriented towards career and earning a respectable living, looking no deeper into the world than required to complete the task.  I didn’t think about the prejudices I might hold or the fault in my work ethic, and was the perfect candidate to be influenced by snippets of news from biased sources.  I would never take the time to analyze my opinions, which I knew could be readily affirmed by friends equally consumed by ambition.  It shouldn’t have taken so much time to get my head screwed on and it no doubt is not yet securely fastened. I have to admire the youth of today who are viewing the world with eyes wide open.  My hat is off to them.  

We live on a remarkable blue sphere.  By inconceivable design or improbable chance it evolved into a beautifully functional living machine, but our sheer numbers and misuse of resources has thrown a wrench in the works. While doing great things we allowed our progress to be undermined by greed, superiority, and a warped sense of dominion. We failed to respect our role in a world where everything is connected, and crippled the bedrock systems that support life.  Even as our understanding improves, we are reluctant to let go of destructive behaviors and practices. 

I think about all this as we cut up our CitiBank cards and take a bike ride into the first big push of autumn air. The earth tilts on its axis and continues around the sun, just as it has for billions of years, just as it likely will for a few billion more.  It has the luxury of time to heal its wounds, and a future more certain than ours. 

Remembering CMK

I first met Dr Charles M Kirkpatrick a couple years after I graduated high school.  I was at Purdue for a day on campus, registering for classes.  Kirk, as he was known to colleagues and friends, was sitting behind a desk in the old Ag Annex Building. He was lean, white-haired, and wore a scowl befitting a man bored with the prospect of signing up another new student. He sat quietly, reviewing my paperwork.  “Greensburg Indiana,” he said, making eye contact. “My home town.”

I’m not sure it meant much to him, but it did to me.  I had never met someone schooled as a wildlife professional, and did not expect my first to be someone intimately familiar with a tree growing from a courthouse tower in Decatur County. He had to know Sand Creek, the way it brushed the edge of town before meandering south and west to merge with the White River. Maybe, in a newly fallen snow, he’d found a fresh fox track where the creek passed under the railroad, and followed ole Reynard half a day as I had. He’d be familiar with Cobbs Fork and its limestone bottom, perfect for wading and looking for salamanders. Perhaps he’d thrown spinners to smallmouth bass in Clifty Creek where they held tight against the bridge abutment on the Vandalia Road, and hunted squirrels in the rolling oak-hickory woodlands east and south of town.  I reasoned that the experiences that led me to this campus likely influenced him as well, and I felt a kinship with the man and a confidence I had come to the right place.

In high school I focused on industrial arts and worked part time as an electrician to get me out of the classroom. I was not college material. Then two weeks before graduating I walked into the office of Miss Risk, my guidance counselor, and said, “I want to study wildlife science.”  “I know,” she said, smiling. Geneva Risk was a seasoned professional who had counseled my dad a generation before, and knew what students wanted sometimes before they did. She laid out a plan for evening courses at a nearby technical school where I would pick up math, economics, and other classes Purdue required.

I wouldn’t have C.M. Kirkpatrick as a class instructor until my junior and senior years but would stop in his office occasionally, maybe to appease my home sickness.  He was editor of The Journal of Wildlife Management, a technical publication with the latest findings in wildlife research, and was a stickler for proper verbiage, both written and spoken. I was a lad with little respect for either.  At one of my visits he abruptly asked, “If two Fords are traveling single file down the highway, what time is it?”  I hadn't the faintest idea. “Tin after tin,” he said. It was a joke, but its purpose was to have me listen to myself and my hillbilly lingo. “It’s ten, not tin; get, not git.” He wore professionalism and integrity like a well tailored shirt, and would subtly and patiently demonstrate to a group of backwoods students that there was infinitely more to his science than a love of hunting and fishing. 

I can picture him now walking the aisles of the classroom, handing out a freshly mimeographed lesson, his brow furrowed. He approaches a girl who is not yet my wife and their eyes meet. She’s intimidated, but reflexively offers him a Milk Dud. He gladly accepts.  

I came to learn he suffered from frequent migraines and wondered if they explained the scowl he often wore, but there was rarely a time he would not break into a smile and chuckle given the slightest incentive.  It would happen as we reminisced about squirrel hunts. “Amazing, how vivid the memories,” he once reflected, “the details of particularly difficult shots.”  It happened anytime we spoke of home turf and families, or the north country, or the Rocky Mountains of the west. 

His specialty was wildlife physiology and he had studied under the tutelage of the great Aldo Leopold at the University of Wisconsin, the man who said, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds… (He) sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” Leopold’s science-based revelation that healthy ecosystems require top predators and his philosophical insights of a land ethic encompassing all living things earned him worldwide acclaim.  

Kirk was among the fortunate to know Leopold personally.  When Aldo’s beloved dog, Gus, was accidentally shot on a bird hunt, it was Kirk who drove the car to the vet, a distraught Aldo in the backseat, a wounded dog on his lap.  “Gus, you poor goddamned dog,”  Aldo repeated over and over. Kirk’s admiration for Leopold’s tenets and values would guide him for life, as they continue to guide and inspire today. 

When C.M. Kirkpatrick was offered the opportunity to develop a wildlife science program at Purdue, he quickly accepted and set the university on course to become a leader in preparing students for careers as biologists, researchers, and naturalists. The undergraduate curriculum he designed and implemented was topped off with a senior year I never wanted to end.  Ornithology, mammalogy, ichthyology, wildlife ecology— what not to love?  

Maybe it was the natural consequence of his aging, the decades of discouraging environmental observations and experiences that wore him down, but it seemed Kirk’s hope for a healthy and viable future for the resource he dedicated his life to was waning. Wildlife would always be tertiary to agriculture and industry and the whims of civilized man. The loss of wetlands and critical habitats was ongoing despite their intrinsic value and proven necessity for a healthy planet. Once, while gazing across a section of native prairie turned cropland, he said, mostly to himself, “A  cottontail would have to pack a lunch to cross that field.” At Purdue, he’d be approached by ag industry leaders concerned that damage from wildlife was threatening their livestock operations or field crops. Rarely was there space for compromise, for consideration of harmonious existence. When my wife and I finished grad school, Kirk came to visit and to meet our first born son, and we joked that Jacob was destined to be a biologist. Kirk set his eyes on the boy and lamented, “There won’t be any wildlife when you grow up.”  Jacob turned 42 this year, and the sixth great extinction is well underway. 

In our senior year we were given an assignment to produce a polished scientific report on a particular species, including life history, past and current research, special concerns, etc..  To avoid bias in grading, Kirk required all reports to be identified only by the author's social security number.  Sometime later, I was in his office and the topic of reports came up.  “Which one was yours?” he asked. “Sharp-tailed grouse,” I replied. Wearing a wry smile and tugging the front of my shirt, he said, “Don’t ever stop writing.”

I could have come clean and told him my wizard roommate had voluntarily dissected my report and made it what it was, but I didn’t. But neither did I take CMK’s words lightly. He made me want to be a better writer.  I’m still working on it, his memory urging me on.

Leopold said, “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’  If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.” In the introduction to his book, A Sand County Almanac, he wrote, “There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.” 

In reality, humanity can’t exist without the elaborate interconnections and collaborations among wild things, but not everyone agrees or understands, and our collective behaviors and actions have resulted in a planet whose environmental systems are collapsing.  We need mentors to help us anticipate and navigate the consequences. I’m glad CMK was mine.

Maisy

We buried a dog this week, and not just any dog.  This was a 70 pound, bearded, coarse haired cur named “Maisy,” and for the past 13 years there was scarcely a day we were not together. 

Lee found her on Craigslist. We were, at the time, about three months into a one year agreement to not own a dog, but there was something in the photo of this girl that altered the plan. We went for an initial meeting and found her sitting bolt upright, propped by long front legs, looking regal. She was rail thin, had a urinary tract infection, in need of spaying. We took her home. 

When we got back to our house she leapt from the car and was on a dead run, exploring her new territory. She spied a chipmunk that streaked across the patio then disappeared under the dock at the edge of the pond. In flaming pursuit the dog launched herself full speed into the pond, then began an awkward attempt to swim while remaining vertical. It was a baffling display of thrashing but she eventually made it to shore, and my wife said, “That dog can’t swim.”  “Agh,” I responded, “all dogs can swim!”  It took some time but I was proven wrong— this dog, indeed, could not swim. With training she would eventually learn, but she would never learn to enjoy it. 

Maisy hated obedience exercises. When put on a leash for training she’d assume a dejected attitude as if cruelly reprimanded, and seemed thoroughly bored with the stop-sit-stay-come routine. It turned out she was listening— and learning— but from her perspective there were matters of much greater priority and urgency. 

In her youth she was built like a cheetah and behaved accordingly. She lived to run and ran with artistry, her head steady, legs sending her forward in long strides, covering great distance with impressive power.  Yet, she could turn on a dime, and with these talents would often overcome whatever she deemed as prey. When in a playful mood, she’d work herself into a frenzy spinning in tight circles with her butt an inch off the ground. She was speed and agility perfected. 

She was a sight hound with a hesitancy to use her nose because stopping to smell things necessarily interfered with running. She would barrel through fields of weeds, leaping high in search of anything she might flush, then follow in hot pursuit as long as she could see her quarry. She was interested in anything furred with one exception: she could identify a hawk at 100 yards and would sprint hell bent in its direction, eyes skyward. 

Her posture while sitting was abnormally erect, her spine nearly perpendicular to the ground.  We were never sure exactly what combination of breeds made her, but there was no shortage of speculation from casual observers. Irish wolfhound was often mentioned, as was Norwegian deerhound and Lurcher.  A DNA test indicated she was predominately Airedale, with Akita and other miscellaneous thrown in.  None of it really mattered.  She was a handsome girl, 95 percent sweetheart, and worked her way into my heart like no dog ever had.

She was a perfect traveler, even on multi-day trips. She’d sit or lie in the backseat without a sound or sign of restlessness, content only to be with us and to occasionally hang her head out the window and drool down the side of the truck.  We spent years adjusting our routines so she could be included, taking time for daily walks, making travel plans that allowed for her, forfeiting hikes and venues where dogs weren’t allowed. 

I sometimes resented her need for accommodation and her senseless disruptions.  There were evenings when her inability to decide if she wanted in or out of the house drove me to distraction. But then she’d walk up and with the most expressive eyes in the animal kingdom ask for hearty rubs behind the ears, and I would respond and she would lean into the pleasure with groans of contentment and all would be forgiven.  And then there were nights in bed when I’d look up to find her eyes locked on mine, watchful, with a loyalty beyond measure. 

She slowed down the last couple years, lost her cheetah behaviors as her hips were failing.  She began struggling with stairs and had to be lifted into the car and onto the bed. She showed only casual interest in nearby squirrels and rabbits, fell behind during walks. Then she quit eating. 

We made arrangements with the vet. One of our sons called for an update and suddenly I couldn’t speak. I don’t cry easily. I don’t cry at all. Damn this dog. 

Sir Walter Scott said, “The misery of keeping a dog is his dying so soon. But, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?” 

It’s different around the house these days. Something’s amiss first thing in the morning and the last thing at night and a hundred times in between. We’re not looking for another dog, we’re still looking for ours. 

She was still warm when we laid her in the ground. Still huggable. I scratched her ears one last time. 

Transitional September

There is a certain quiet in September, when the heat of summer has broken and a light breeze sways the flowers of Queen Anne’s lace. It’s the absence of bird song. Their season of procreation is complete and, for many, migration has commenced. They've been replaced by a chorus of crickets, who accompany me as I pick the last tomatoes, as I watch honey bees working goldenrod and wingstem, as squadrons of southbound swallows dip low over the pond. 

It is a month of transition— no longer summer but not yet fall— and big changes are afoot.  September stands between productivity and dormancy, between bare feet and insulated boots, between flowers and frost. It has come quickly but we’re ready for it, as the root cellar and pantry and freezer will attest. 

In another month the combination of diminishing daylength and cooler temperatures will spawn chemical changes in leaves, and some will scream with yellows and reds that cannot go unnoticed. And squirrels will pack the hollow in the maple tree with walnuts, and the queen hornet will seek shelter in woodland duff, and groundhogs will be fattened for a season of sleep.

This is the month when the unattended flower bed comes to glory, when the beggar tick and thistle and bugleweed make their unsolicited displays, and there is beauty there for those who look. The wildflowers of late summer are no less spectacular than those of early spring. Tidiness in the garden can wait; neglect has its rewards. 

On a September afternoon we take a bike ride along the river and come upon a group of wild turkeys loitering roadside. We coast within a rock’s throw before they move on, showing minimal concern. Around the next curve we encounter a rope-tailed red fox pup, who trots nonchalantly down the centerline for 100 yards before leaping through jewelweed and chicory and being swallowed by underbrush. 

I read a piece this morning written by the director of an integrative health and healing facility on the California coast.  He mentioned how the rhythm of September and October has changed.  What was once a couple months of sunny days and mild temperatures is now a time when he is particularly alert to the smell of smoke, and dinner conversations with friends include news of floods and droughts and evacuation routes. He calls it “eco-grief,” which unlike other forms of grief does not diminish with time, but intensifies. “Our eco-grief not only mourns the loss of what was,” he writes, “but also of what will be gone.”

I am by definition an old man. It’s been my living and the living of my boomer cohort that has led us here, and we have thrown a veil of uncertainty over the aspirations of generations to come. We live on, continuing to support the industrial machine responsible for the mess. A full scale transition to green energy is not easy and we are not united in our resolve to get it done quickly. 

In September, the month of transition, we can appreciate all the natural beauty we still have while looking ahead, adjusting our sights and ambitions.  Today’s eco-grief-stricken youth have everything to lose. They are watching us.