The Sporting Mind (2nd Edition)

This post is just a copy of one from a couple of days ago, revised to read more like the way I had dreamed it up in my head while doing chores, before I got mired in the process of actually writing it. To be fair, I've left the original post in place.

Some people seem to look at the world through the lens of a team sport rivalry. To me, growing up without television or trips to the rink, team sports were something I looked at, not through; and I viewed them as a sometimes alarming curiosity. Now it occurs to me that perhaps others were so deeply involved and immersed in the world of sports that it became their window, their frame of reference when looking at the wider world beyond.

Take, for example, this post by Kate at Small Dead Animals. She asks, "Is Anyone Else Keeping Track?" Ah, the stats. Actually, I have wondered what the world would be like if people paid as much attention to the stats of nature observations as they did to the stats of baseball. But that's an aside. Here's the first part of Kate's post.

Drought, floods, severe winters, warm winters, more frequent storm activity, less frequent storm activity, early frost, early thaw, receding glaciers.

All have, to the best of my recollection as a news consumer, been cited by one climate research expert or another as evidence of "global warming".

Wait a moment. Who is doing the "citing"? Who is calling these events or observations "evidence"? Can you really use your "recollection as a news consumer" to summarise the activities and opinions of "climate research experts"? Kate goes on:

The same experts will also quickly caution that even in the midst of dramatic climate change, one should expect periods of "average" rainfall, temperature, storm activity.

"The same experts"? Try substituting "journalists" for "experts." I don't think you would hear an expert talking about expecting average conditions. Instead, they might talk about conditions being in constant fluctuation, swinging widely above and below an average that is creeping almost imperceptibly. Who can remember whether winters were colder back in one's childhood, or whether they just didn't make boots quite as warm back then? Or whether it felt colder because we had to stand outside more when we were kids, waiting for the school bus? I remember a bitter December cold spell in the late '80's, but of course I don't remember what that winter's average was like. I remember Dad working outside in his shirtsleeves in February some years earlier than that, too. But those are just fluctuations. What the averages were, I couldn't possibly begin to guess. And then, to guess at averages around the globe? Absolutely out of the question. Or to try to compare a grandparent's recollections with my own? Pointless. They say they walked ten miles to school every day, and ten miles home again, and it was uphill both ways.

We remember (and embellish) the extremes, the unusual. We remark on the remarkable. The average is forgettable. In fact, our brains function by tuning out the background and saving perceptive and processing power for anything new and different.

Most of what we see in the news being linked to global warming is not what the experts would call "evidence." In fact, in much of their writing, experts don't mention "evidence" at all. They talk about observations, and whether these observations are in accord with what is expected based on a current hypothesis about climate systems, or whether these observations indicate that a hypothesis should be rejected.

When discussing the significance of their findings, experts may talk about how it fits within a body of scientific evidence that supports the current understanding of climate systems. However, there is an important difference here from the way Kate seems to be talking about evidence.

In science, as in law, evidence is not simply piled up on one side or the other, to see which side has the most. "Weight of evidence" is an important legal concept, but there is also the matter of building a case. The pieces of evidence have to fit together to create a meaningful whole.

I suspect that a great deal of popular confusion about science could result from the influence of sports on popular thinking. In sports, it is all about keeping score for each side. A goal is evidence of a team's prowess. Pile up enough goals in the time allotted, while preventing goals by the other side, and your team is declared the winner.

Now that I think about it, much of our society's function is organized along similar lines. From town hall meetings to board rooms to the House of Commons, decisions are finalized by counting up votes for or against. Opinion polls shape policies before they are brought to official votes. Consumers are encouraged to notice how they are voting with their dollars.

Science works quite differently. It is not simply a matter of counting up observations for or against a certain understanding. A single conflicting observation can bring down or "falsify" a hypothesis. Of course, there will be checking and double-checking to find out whether there was something false about that one observation, but if it holds, then the hypothesis does not. A new hypothesis might bear considerable resemblance to the old, rejected hypothesis, but it will take into account the new observation. Contrast sports, where it doesn't matter how well executed a particular goal was; if it wasn't made by the winning team, it doesn't carry the same weight.

Now, getting back to Kate's list. Most of the phenomena that she mentioned are discussed by some experts, but not as evidence of global warming. Instead they are predicted as outcomes of global warming. If they fail to appear, or if different outcomes appear, then it is the predictive models that are shown to be lacking. That doesn't mean that evidence has been struck down; it wasn't evidence in the first place.

A couple of the phenomena that Kate listed come close to the kind of observations that climate researchers would consider when questioning whether global temperatures are increasing as expected, or not. Winters would be considered, not in terms of this or that winter being "severe" or "warm," but in terms of average winter temperatures trending colder or warmer. Early thaw has been observed as a long-term trend in western Canada, based not only on temperatures but also on indirect observations, such as dates of peak runoff volumes, and flowering dates of poplar trees at Edmonton (which have moved nearly a month earlier over the course of a century). Indirect observations like these may help to compensate for problems in instrumental records of surface temperatures, by reflecting the ongoing influence of temperature over large areas of the landscape instead of just snapshots of exact temperature at single locations and times. However, they are still vulnerable to problems; for example, the shift in flowering dates for poplars in Edmonton may be partly due to the same urban-heat-island effect that affects parts of the instrumental record. In their 2002 article (pdf) about the shift in flowering dates, Beaubien and Freeland discuss this problem and provide some comparative information about temperatures within and outside Edmonton.

That gives you a glimpse into the way science works. These researchers are not just piling up points to win the argument. They are trying to give as much relevant information as they can, to let others continue the investigation and refine understanding in the problem areas.

Once again, let's return to Kate's post, and the final phenomenon on her list, "receding glaciers." Glacier length has been used as a proxy when estimating past temperature regimes. It has the advantage of slow change, which means that it provides a built-in averaging of the temperatures affecting the glacier. However, it is greatly complicated by the influence of changes in precipitation, and may also be influenced by other factors such as dust absorbing solar radiation and heating the glacier surface, tectonic activity, ice within the glacier crossing threshholds of density and fluidity, and so on. Again, averaging is important when interpreting glacier length, to control for some of these other factors by averaging across a large number of glaciers.

But Kate gleefully seizes on a report about a specific subset of glaciers (western Himalayan) as the final item to complete her list of contradictions in the "evidence of 'global warming'."

With today's addition of expanding glaciers, the list is finally complete. It's therefore, official - climate change proponants have taken ownership of virtually every local and global weather phenomenon worthy of newspaper ink, including "average".

One would think that more people would have noticed.

"Climate change proponents" - I like that. As if these researchers are hoping for a big, bad change.

What I see in this news story (and what I see more clearly when I seek out its source, a press releasefrom Newcastle University) is diligence by researchers exploring an observation that appears to be in conflict with current understandings. What Kate sees is just one more example of dishonest politically or financially motivated researchers attempting to contort any and all changes in weather or climate, regardless of their direction, into evidence of global warming. (This might not be obvious by reading her post in isolation, but in the context of her climate-related posts over the last couple of years, her subtext is plain to see. In this case, I would assume that Kate suspects these "climate change proponents" of attempting proactive damage control, coming up with a way to explain glacier expansion as an effect of global warming before somebody else observes the same glacier expansion and calls it evidence of global cooling.)

Now, let's look more closely at the press release. It mentions the title of the forthcoming journal article: "Conflicting signal of climatic change in the Upper Indus Basin." Hardly sounds like these researchers are trumpeting their goal scored in support of a global warming win. Sure, Kate can interpret it as a sly move to protect their cherished theory from conflicting evidence, if she wants. But from my perspective, it sounds very different. It sounds like these researchers are not going to join in on any simplistic fearful chorus about everything heating up; instead they're doing their best to clarify what they actually are seeing in climate trends.

Perhaps more importantly, I notice that a large part of the press release (and a significant part of the news item Kate linked) are concerned with the implications of these trends for water supplies for 50 million people in Pakistan. Whenever someone argues persistently with Kate about climate change, she falls back to her argument that resources should be used for adaptation, not for trying to prevent it. Here is a team of researchers working towards a sound method of predicting future runoff volumes into reservoirs, as the climate changes. What a fine contribution to the ability of those 50 million people to adapt - and Kate is bashing the news in order to score a point with her readers.

Sometimes I wonder whether perhaps a lot of bloggers who present themselves as climate change skeptics actually understand the science just fine. Perhaps they have their motives for wanting to see business as usual and adaptation only after the consequences are upon us - and they're willing to use ignorance among their readers as the means to that end. It could be a powerful modus operandi. You see, in the court of public opinion, it doesn't really matter whether the pieces of evidence fit within a meaningful whole, or even whether they are valid. Incorrect evidence works just fine, as long as it scores a point with some people, and as long as a later correction doesn't get too much attention. It's like the goalie knocking the puck into his own net; a total mistake still counts as a goal.

And then there's a goal scored by breaking the rules. As long as a ref doesn't notice, that goal still counts.

Of course, in blogging, even if the ref does call a foul, most of your readers won't notice. You can even publish the correction right there as an update to the offending post, and you won't suffer much of a penalty. Your readers will have moved on to your more recent posts. And the final score of the game is never published anyway. So what counts? Anytime you can get that puck in the net, no matter how you do it. That's what counts.

Of course, you have to balance that with the danger of losing readers. If there's nobody in the rink to see the goal, then it doesn't count after all.

But I don't see much sign of these skeptics losing readers.

Kittens Next Door - Literally

This old garage next door has become more of a toolshed, since there is a newer garage blocking off the driveway in front of it. The door stays up a lot - enough that the neighbourhood feral kittens have come to trust it as part of their playground.

Kitten pile. There are three there - a black one in front and to the right, a grey one behind and to the left (and over), and an orange kitten sandwich filling in the middle. This was just a quick shot out my kitchen window.

I tried to look casual, wandering onto our driveway with the short stepladder, but they're on the alert now.
The best I could do before they scurried into the shadows on the upper part of the door:

Awww. There are a few others, I think. We've seen a beautiful mostly-white kitten with pale orange patches around the ears and down the tail, playing with the leaves that have begun to rattle around on our driveway since the drought. Reminded us of Marshmallow, the sweetest cat ever (named for being white with lightly-toasted tips), and the kids were ready to send our Pumpkin away if only they could catch the kitten and have "Marshmallow" back. After some sober discussion we agreed that the new Marshmallow might be just as nasty as Pumpkin has been - and besides, he's starting to come around. He absolutely loves having his tummy rubbed... he just doesn't know it yet.

I think this is the mama. Her photo shoot happened earlier this summer, back when she still had her youthful figure.

I believe she's the daughter of the one we used to call "mama," a mostly-white calico with colour around the ears and down the tail, and a few small spots of colour on her body. We still see her around occasionally, but this daughter and her young family have taken over most of the use of our yard. This younger mama would be a half-sister (at least) to our Pumpkin. She's been keeping out of view more these days, but in the spring she used to come and check out my work as I dug in the garden. She would lie down in the trench where I had removed some sod, and as long as I didn't get too close or walk directly towards her, she would stay a while and observe. Much tamer than her mother, but still decidedly a wild cat.



One of these days I might pass along some photos to the Town Office, but if you want me to hold off until you claim and collar one of these cats, let me know.

UPDATE: I saw some more kittens scurrying into the shadows when I walked onto our dark driveway last night (coming home from a church meeting). There is another black one, with some white on the face and paws; and another white-and-pale-orange one, this one with the orange covering much of its head and most of its back. Which reminds me, there is a white-and-dark-grey one with similar colour distribution. That makes seven, doesn't it?

Where do all these litters and litters of kittens go?

The Sporting Mind

This post is an old version, left here for reference, for those who wish to see how it looked when I first published it. The final version is here.

Some people seem to look at the world through the lens of a team sport rivalry. To me, growing up without television or trips to the rink, team sports were something I looked at, not through; and I viewed them as a sometimes alarming curiosity. Now it occurs to me that perhaps others were so deeply involved and immersed in the world of sports that it became their window, their frame of reference when looking at the wider world beyond.

Take, for example, this post by Kate at Small Dead Animals. She asks, "Is Anyone Else Keeping Track?" Ah, the stats. Actually, I have wondered what the world would be like if people paid as much attention to the stats of nature observations as they did to the stats of baseball. But that's an aside. Here's the first part of Kate's post.

Drought, floods, severe winters, warm winters, more frequent storm activity, less frequent storm activity, early frost, early thaw, receding glaciers.

All have, to the best of my recollection as a news consumer, been cited by one climate research expert or another as evidence of "global warming".

Wait a moment. Who is doing the "citing"? Who is calling these events or observations "evidence"? Can you really use your "recollection as a news consumer" to summarise the activities and opinions of "climate research experts"? Kate goes on:

The same experts will also quickly caution that even in the midst of dramatic climate change, one should expect periods of "average" rainfall, temperature, storm activity.

"The same experts"? Try substituting "journalists" for "experts." I don't think you would hear an expert talking about expecting average conditions. Instead, they might talk about conditions being in constant fluctuation, swinging widely above and below an average that is creeping almost imperceptibly. Who can remember whether winters were colder back in one's childhood, or whether they just didn't make boots quite as warm back then? Or whether we had to stand outside more when we were kids, waiting for the school bus? I remember a bitter December cold spell in the late '80's, but of course I don't remember what that winter's average was like. I remember Dad working outside in his shirtsleeves in February some years earlier than that, too. But those are just fluctuations. What the averages were, I couldn't possibly begin to guess. And then, to guess at averages around the globe? Absolutely out of the question. Or to try to compare a grandparent's recollections with my own? Pointless. They say they walked ten miles to school every day, and ten miles home again, and it was uphill both ways.

We remember (and embellish) the extremes, the unusual. We remark on the remarkable. The average is forgettable. In fact, our brains function by tuning out the background and saving perceptive and processing power for anything new and different.

Most of what we see in the news being linked to global warming is not what the experts would call "evidence." In fact, I doubt that most experts would talk about "evidence" at all. They would talk about observations, and whether these observations are in accord with what is expected based on a current hypothesis about climate systems, or whether these observations indicate that a hypothesis should be rejected.

UPDATED: Ouch. I did some reading to refresh my recollections about scientific method and such. I shouldn't have been so dismissive of the term "evidence" when talking about science. I've added the word "popular" to the sentence that follows, but much of this post feels uncomfortable to me now. Comments welcome.

The popular concept of evidence does not fit well in the realm of science. It fits more naturally in the realm of a courtroom, of course, but it also fits well in the realm of team sports. A goal is evidence of a team's prowess. Pile up enough goals in the time allotted, while preventing goals by the other side, and your team is declared the winner.

Science works quite differently. A single conflicting observation can bring down or "falsify" a hypothesis. Of course, there will be checking and double-checking to find out whether there was something false about that one observation, but if it holds, then the hypothesis does not. A new hypothesis might bear considerable resemblance to the old, rejected hypothesis, but it will take into account the new observation. Contrast sports, where it doesn't matter how well executed that goal was; if it wasn't made by the winning team, it doesn't carry the same weight.

Most of the phenomena that Kate listed are discussed by some experts, but not as evidence of global warming. Instead they are predicted as outcomes of global warming. If they fail to appear, or if different outcomes appear, then it is the predictive models that are shown to be lacking. That doesn't mean that evidence has been struck down; it wasn't evidence in the first place.

A couple of the phenomena that Kate listed come close to the kind of observations that climate researchers would consider when questioning whether global temperatures are increasing as expected, or not. Winters would be considered, not in terms of this or that winter being "severe" or "warm," but in terms of average winter temperatures trending colder or warmer. Early thaw has been observed as a long-term trend in western Canada, based on indirect observations such as peak runoff volumes, and flowering dates of poplar trees at Edmonton (which have moved a full month earlier over the course of a century). Observations like these help to refine surface temperature estimates which otherwise are based on incomplete or inadequately controlled instrumental records. UPDATED: It occurs to me that the shift in flowering dates for urban poplars would be subject to the same urban-heat-island problem that affects parts of the instrumental record. This problem is mentioned in a 2002 article (pdf) about the shift in flowering dates (Beaubien and Freeland).

Then we come to Kate's final listed phenomenon, "receding glaciers." Glacier length has been used as a proxy when estimating past temperature regimes. It has the advantage of slow change, which means that it provides a built-in averaging of the temperatures affecting the glacier. However, it is greatly complicated by the influence of changes in precipitation, and may also be influenced by other factors such as dust absorbing solar radiation and heating the glacier surface, tectonic activity, ice within the glacier crossing threshholds of density and fluidity, and so on. Again, averaging is important when interpreting glacier length, to control for some of these other factors by averaging across a large number of glaciers.

But Kate gleefully seizes on a report about western Himalayan glaciers as the final item to complete her list of contradictions in the "evidence of 'global warming'."

With today's addition of expanding glaciers, the list is finally complete. It's therefore, official - climate change proponants have taken ownership of virtually every local and global weather phenomenon worthy of newspaper ink, including "average".

One would think that more people would have noticed.

Actually, the news item is not clear about whether expanding glaciers is an observation, or a prediction - it sounds more like the latter, in which case it certainly can't be criticized as wacky evidence. UPDATED - it's an observation, and related work at explanation and further prediction, as I noticed when I read the university press release (link below) - but I forgot to come back to this paragraph and change it. But perhaps Kate intended to suggest that "climate change proponents" are doing proactive damage control, coming up with a way to explain glacier expansion as an effect of global warming before somebody observes glacier expansion and calls it evidence of global cooling.

"Climate change proponents" - I like that. As if these researchers are hoping for a big, bad change.

Now, let's look closer to the source of this news item. The press release from Newcastle University mentions the title of the forthcoming journal article: "Conflicting signal of climatic change in the Upper Indus Basin." Hardly sounds like these researchers are trumpeting their goal scored in support of a global warming win. Sure, Kate can interpret it as a sly move to protect their cherished theory from conflicting evidence, if she wants. But from my perspective, it sounds very different. It sounds like researchers weary of simplistic fearful chanting about everything heating up, doing their best to clarify what they actually are seeing in climate trends.

Perhaps more importantly, I notice that a large part of the press release (and a significant part of the news item Kate linked) are concerned with the implications of these trends for water supplies for 50 million people in Pakistan. Whenever someone argues persistently with Kate about climate change, she falls back to her argument that resources should be used for adaptation, not for trying to prevent it. Here is a team of researchers working towards a sound method of predicting future runoff volumes into reservoirs, as the climate changes. What a fine contribution to the ability of those 50 million people to adapt - and Kate is bashing the news in order to score a point with her readers.

Am I wasting my time?

UPDATE: Speaking of time, I conclude that I have been too anxious about timeliness of posting, and it's time to put more work into the quality.

Home from Kenosee

I started this post a week ago, Sunday August 20th. It's refreshing, now, to read it and remember what the Kenosee Lake Kitchen Party was like. Today I saw Denise, another camper at the Kitchen Party, and we agreed that there was a great let-down afterward. But there is still the music, and next year...

Saturday morning I finally slept in - just a little. All week I had been waking at six or earlier, with fiddle tunes running in my head, and all those new guitar challenges twitching my fingers, and bubbling underneath it all, a deep and sparkling joy that wouldn't let me slow down.

The Kenosee Kitchen Party was magical. I never dreamed I could learn so much in one week, and I can't remember having so much fun, ever, not in my entire lifetime.

But I didn't get enough sleep.

We had concerts every evening, the first three by our instructors (incredible playing!) and the last two by the whole lot of us (sheer fun). I couldn't sit still at those concerts, partly because my back ached from playing so much, but partly because all those jigs and reels got in my blood and made me dance. Then after the concerts we'd move down to the campfire on the lakeshore and play and sing some more. When I finally got to bed each night, the music was still with me, and I lay wide awake, dancing inside.

And then woke at six. Or four. My cabin was right across from the washrooms, so you'd think I could just stumble over there with my eyes half open and then get back to bed, but no. My head would be whirling with all the stuff to learn, and how I needed to practise, and besides, I forgot my alarm clock. So I'd lie wide awake some more, and then give up and leap into another day.

Wednesday morning, standing groggy in front of my puffy-eyed reflection in the shower room, I recalled my assignment from the day before: to write a silly lyric having something to do with fish, to the tune of the Westphalia Waltz. Simple enough, except that I couldn't remember that tune at all. I was pondering this problem and the possible remedies, when some sadistic muse hit me over the head with a still-flapping fishy bit of doggerel.

Fish -
dreaming of fish -
dreaming of Lucas's fish.
I wish
that I were a trout.
Just
to be a fish -
just to be Lucas's fish,
waving above his snout.

I went quickly from groggy to giggling.

Perhaps I should explain a bit. Or a lot.

The Kenosee Kitchen Party is a five-day music camp, based on the idea of a fiddle camp, but aimed at a wider audience. At a fiddle camp, there are guitar and piano classes for people who want to learn to accompany fiddle music, but at Kenosee those classes were more general, for any lovers of guitar and piano. We guitar students got to learn all sorts of things, including some new tunes to play as a group at the final concert. Then again, we were also divided up into groups and handed a bunch of chord charts to learn, to accompany groups of fiddlers at the final concert.

But getting back to Westphalia and the fish . . . on Tuesday, the whole lot of us (fiddlers, pianists, and guitarists, including instructors) were divided into three mixed groups and sent off to rehearse for a "band scramble." Each group had three hours, one hour each day from Tuesday to Thursday, to come up with some sort of musical offering for the Thursday evening Pig 'n' Whistle.

At our first rehearsal, somebody suggested we start by playing something that everyone knew. Westphalia was offered, and those of us who didn't know it said we would learn. One of the guitar students was delighted to hear it, because it was the same tune that she knew as the "Dreamy Fish Waltz," and she was looking for the lyrics.

Nobody knew the lyrics.

But the idea of a fish had been planted. The instructors in our group exchanged mirthful looks and explained that Lucas Welsh, another instructor, had won the 2003 Saskatchewan Fiddling Championship while wearing a hat with a large fish head on the front. There had been talk of the "Power of the Fish" ever since. So, maybe we could come up with a fishy lyric. Did anyone in the group write lyrics?

My wrist stayed on my leg, but my hand lifted enough to be noticed.

And so it came to pass, that instead of sleeping the last couple of hours before breakfast on Wednesday, I was juggling fishy rhymes, and wondering if I even had the right melody.

Turns out that I did. And Thursday night at the Pig 'n' Whistle, I got to sing it. Got to, or had to? The instructors did some wonderful monologue over the A section of the tune, telling the story of the fish and throwing in lots of other fsshy stuff. And I sang:

Fish -
dreaming of fish -
dreaming of Lucas's fish.
I wish
that I were a perch-
-in' on his hat.
Just
to be a fish -
just to be Lucas's fish,
winkin' at April Verch.

Fish -
dreaming of fish -
dreaming of Lucas's fish.
I wish
that I were a trout.
Just
to be a fish -
just to be Lucas's fish,
bobbing above his snout.

(and some more monologue, and then - )

Fish -
dreaming of fish -
dreaming of Lucas's fish.
I wish
that I were a perch-
-in' on his hat.
Just
to be a fish -
just to be Lucas's fish,
winkin' at April Verch.
Imagine that!

Fish -
dreaming of fish -
dreaming of Lucas's fish.
I wish
that I were a wall-
-eye or a pick-er-el.
Just
to be a fish -
just to be Lucas's fish,
hoping that I
don't fall.
His bow would fillet me!

Friday night at the campfire I had to sing it again, by request. I don't think any of us will ever hear Westphalia again without thinking of Lucas's fish.

After the Pig 'n' Whistle came a square dance. I was standing by the wall, watching the dancers gather in squares, when our guitar instructor Ray Bell walked in, pointed at me, and found me a partner. What fun! I had to bully my young guitar-guy partner to keep dancing - he wanted to go join the band, but I told him he had to find me a new partner first - and after a while he caught on and had a good time, too. Friday night's old-tyme dance had some square dancing as well, but this time Ray invited me to play in the band. A few songs into the dance, Andy McNamee showed up with his guitar, too. He said I looked like I was having so much fun, he had to join in. Andy is a gentleman, an octogenarian with lots of stories from his Air Force days. He and I were often the first to show up at our classes, and he would tell me tales and admire my playing. I admired his, too. I hope he's there again next year.

Friday's campfire was more subdued. Lucas wasn't there - that was part of it. He had left immediately after the concert for an eight-and-a-half-hour drive up to Big River to play in the Bluegrass Festival. And that was after staying up until two or three in the morning all week, and no sleeping in; breakfast ended at nine. Crazy guy.

But Lucas wasn't the only one who had left, and those of us that remained were starting to think about goodbyes and home, I guess. Linda and Audrey, Denise and Lori and Cheryl, I hope it won't be a whole year before we're getting together to play again. You're not far away. And Michele, and Buzz, and Al and Bill. My kitchen is cozy - come on over!

And then it was Saturday morning, and I could hear people going to breakfast. I didn't even comb my hair, just threw on some clothes and went. One more hearty meal, and back to my cabin to throw my stuff in the suitcase. Ruth would be waiting. Six weeks she'd been away at the Air Cadet Summer Training Centre in Penhold, Alberta, taking music courses, and I hadn't even met her at the airport, because she got in during our final concert at Kenosee. My friend Anita had met her instead, and taken her back to their farm overnight. I phoned to say I was on my way, and Anita told me that Ruth wasn't complaining, but she was clearly longing to be home, now that she was so close.

Some quick goodbyes, and I was on the road. The highway south out of the Moose Mountains never seemed so high and beckoning, nor the sky so wide and bright. But as I came to Carlyle, the fiddle tunes and toe-tapping and hollering for more had begun to recede, and my old habits of thought came pushing forward again: thoughts about agriculture and industry and ecology and such. I tried to listen to the CD I'd bought, "In My Dreams" by Lucas Welsh (scroll down), but the player in the car always skips so badly that it locks into one short loop of sound and goes nowhere. Oh well. I drove on south of Carlyle, watching combines working in the fields.

Soon I was greeting the kids at Anita's farm. They were packed and ready to go - probably the quickest departure we'd ever made from that hard-to-leave place. And everyone was talking at once, all trying to tell our stories of the past week or of the whole summer. The Geo Metro is a small place for a clamor like that. I bit back my own stories and tried to listen, and tried to be glad of my kids and their excitement, but they were urgent and demanding and becoming strident, and I missed the rhythm and harmony of the constant sound at camp.

Through all of this, I was driving, automatically, down the gravel road. Suddenly, but gently, my eyes were drawn to the drift of alfalfa along the ditch, flowering, and twinkling with butterflies.

******

Home. Our cat, completely out of character, purring and loving because he'd missed us. If only he could appreciate us while we're around! The note I'd left for Mom, under the bowl of tomatoes, saying "Help yourself - and please don't do my dishes!" The tomato bowl, empty, and - wonder of wonders - the dishes left undone, for once. Luggage to unpack, laundry, those dishes, some meals. And then, at bedtime, long after dark, the sudden recollection that James was supposed to have walked a friend's dog today.

What to do? The dog might bark when we arrived and disturb the neighbours, but what if he'd run out of food and water?

I let James off, and went to walk the dog myself. When I let myself into the garage and turned on my flashlight, there was no welcoming rush of doggy energy, but as I took a few steps forward, there was a soft, anxious "Woof!" I spoke and he bounded joyfully to me. He had plenty of food, but he sure wanted that walk. Jog. Gallop. I let him run a bit at the south edge of town, a little worried about him disappearing into the shadows, but unwilling to deny him this little bit of daily freedom.

When we turned back again, there were the Northern Lights, arching bright and bold even through the wash of the lights of town. I returned a contented dog to his yard, and finally made my way home alone. I stopped for a moment by the darker space of the empty schoolyard, and watched the Northern Lights dance.

Still wondering

If I sing in the forest
with no human ears but my own to hear
is it music?

Web-lag

Don't-a wanna blog no more, no more;
I don't-a wanna blog no more.
But how in the heck
can I moan and fret
if I ain't-a gonna blog no more?

I'm tired of hearing myself talk.

Maybe I'll hook up some cables and let you hear my guitar pickin' instead.

But it's not exciting to listen to yet, not for anyone else but me. For me it's a great thrill, because it's so much better than before, and I can imagine it getting better and better still.

One of these days I'll post the story of my adventures at the Kenosee Lake Kitchen Party last week. I have a draft in progress. Trouble is, something has changed inside, and I'd much rather do stuff than talk about it. I had been thinking about turning the Daily Bed into the "Daily Bread" (as the food moves indoors) or the "Daily Fret" (a guitar practise journal, or a grumble, depending on the day) or a "Daily Yet-not-thought-of-word-here." Then I thought it could become something more metaphorical - the "bed" being any rooting zone in my life that needs tending - but then I realized that I'd rather write that sort of stuff in a private journal, thanks.

And I thought about moving Arcol-o-Gist towards my original concept, putting in a lot more community news and focussing my opinion pieces more locally. But I'd rather write a book.

And speaking of books, I haven't been reading much lately. I miss that.

Mostly I just want to tend to my own life without trying to make it interesting for anyone else. I dunno, maybe it would be a good exercise for me, to try to make housecleaning interesting. But I just want to get on with it.

So please excuse me while I dig in the back of literal and metaphorical closets and decide what I need, what I want in my life, and what is just dragging me down. Once I know what my treasures are, perhaps I'll share some.

For now, I just want to say thank you to all of you who have given me so much over the past year in your comments both here and on your own blogs. I've been encouraged, challenged, gentled, toughened, and best of all, warmed at heart with your virtual hugs.

Time will tell whether I bounce back to blogging in a week or two, or just lurk quietly in other people's comments boxes, or vanish into the wilderness for a while. But if you need to know what I'm up to, please get in touch. It's koelmac - the four-three field code for June grass (Koeleria macrantha) - and the domain is yahoo dot ca.

Take the Log Out

This morning I found myself thinking about Jesus' teaching about taking the log out of one's own eye. It struck me as significant that he said to take it out, not just be aware of it. Really, if this was just the popular "live-and-let-live" idea, he could have said something like this:

Before you mention to your dinner partner that there's a crumb in his mustache, be aware of the week-old sandwiches in your beard.

But no, he said to take the log out of your eye. It's affecting the way you see the world. When you go to take that speck out of your neighbour's eye, with that timber swinging around in front of your face, you just might blind him.

I think that's why I appreciate Eleutheros so much. He is not just talking about a dream of a better path, and what it might look like. He is describing what he sees, because he is there.

He's been writing a lot lately. I won't likely be writing at all this week, but I highly recommend Eleu's recent posts, if you haven't discovered them yet, or his archives - even a second or third time through.

Change

"How are the hazelnuts?" I asked.

"Terrible," was the reply. Mom and Dad figured that, with so little berry and seed production generally this year, anything that did grow had been snapped up.

We were chatting over lunch. I had spent the morning helping Mom in her seed gardens, in exchange for her listening ear, while James helped Dad lay some laminate flooring, in exchange for some spending money. Through the early afternoon, I played Dad's guitar with half my attention, and chewed over my favourite dilemmas some more with Mom. When the temperature outside was peaking, I decided I really needed to spend some time just walking the land. In hindsight, I think Mom probably needed some time to shake herself free of my burdensome talk.

As I climbed the trail behind the house, I thought of the camera I didn't bring. Just as well, I told myself. This time is for me, not for the blog.

I went first to the summit of Anemometer Hill, perhaps the highest point of our little highland, which is itself the highest land within the surrounding several miles of hills. I stood a few minutes just soaking up the vista to the west. And I heard myself discussing that view with blog readers, debating the definition of a hill.

The landscape is very striking these days, with the grass on the ridges dry and bleached pale, while the aspen and shrub areas are still a rich dark green. There was no water visible in all those miles of view, but I knew where I would find it.

I moved on, away from the usual routes along mowed trails, and into the bush. The cattle-and-deer trails have shifted a little since the days when I did a lot of roaming, and I spent some time weaving from one hint of a trail to another before I found the main thread of the path I remembered, and emerged onto the tiny grass area that faces northwest just off the crest of the same height of land.

I was surprised to see a large patch of blue on the neighbour's pasture to the north. That slough must be holding up well in spite of the recent drought. Maybe the rain on Tuesday brought the level up some.

Down the north slope I went, watching my footing and still slipping a little, pausing to gaze up and around at the birches and the forest canopy stretching away, and to wonder if I could capture the sense of this place in a picture. Ah, the blog had followed me here, too.

There were hazelnuts. Some were ripe already - I've never seen them that early. Twila and I used to pick them around the first weekend in September. As I moved down the slope, my path unravelled into fading threads in the hazelnut understory. A bit of colour off to the right caught my eye - high-bush cranberries! Turning red, here in the second week of August.

I cast about for the best offer of a trail, and then, noticing a brightness that might be an opening, I went sideways. What I found was more than an opening; it was the mowed trail along the toe of the north slope, and I'd have been on it in only a few feet more, if I had just pushed straight ahead.

I let it lead me west. At the edge of the hay field I paused to enjoy the return of the breeze and the last of the shade. Not a spectacular view at that spot. Dad had said something about the view I could get from the house site I'd mentioned to him - the latest dream site in a long series. I asked myself: do I need a good view? That's what walks are for. Too good a view, and I might just sit at home.

I took a few swallows from my too-small water bottle, and set out across the sun-burnt hayfield, moving gently in the heat. When the truck trail turned south, I continued west on a cattle trail toward the dam.

The ravine here used to be densely forested, like most ravines in these hills, but now there is not a large tree anywhere near the dam. It was the death of the trees, that dam, because it brought the beaver.

I remember how I used to analyze the landcover as I roamed, noting all the ways that previous tenants of this land had changed things. Now when I wander, I notice new changes, wrought by my own family, and sometimes even by me.

I wonder if Mom and Dad would have put that dam in, had they realized what the beaver would do. The first few years of impact were the most obvious, as that swath of forest fell. I might have thought that it would end there, after the beaver ran out of trees within a reasonable radius of the water. Yet now - how many years later? ten? fifteen? - the beaver's work goes on, mostly out of sight, unless you take the time and effort to walk the ravine downstream.

I crossed the dam, pausing to admire butterflies puddling on the damp mud, duckweed stippling the water surface, and a robust sedge that's new since my last visit, growing on the seepage areas of the downstream side. At the dry spillway I hesitated. I wanted to walk the bottom of the ravine, but I knew the beaver had wreaked havoc with the cattle trail down there, drowning it under a series of small pools created when they built one little dam after another below our big dam. From what I could see from my high vantage point, the problem hadn't resolved itself yet.

A new option beckoned, though: beyond the spillway, the cattle trail continued up and across the north bank of the ravine. I followed.

It was a good trail, much better than I remembered from the last time I wandered here, and taking an unusual course across the midslope. Cattle tend to drift to the bottom of slopes like this. Midslope trails do exist, winding (like this one) along where the bush ends and the grass of the upper slope begins, but on a steep sidehill, they are rarely so well travelled. I suspected that this was an effect of the beaver's work below.

Finally the trail plunged down into the thick forest, down, down, driving my toes painfully into the fronts of my boots. When the ground flattened out, the understory opened suddenly into a magical grassy place overarched with great old trees. The confluence, I realized - the place where the dammed ravine joins the Deep Ravine. This deep ravine was a dark, mysterious barrier to much of my childhood wanderings, and it poses such a restriction to westward movement that it forms a sort of boundary of our farm, though the cattle do use the thin wedge of upland pasture that lies beyond. For some years there was no fence on the west, and the Deep Ravine functioned as a real boundary, as our cattle kept mostly to the east of it, and the neighbours' stayed mostly west. (By the way, I'm calling it "our farm" for convenience - our farm, our dam, our cattle - but it's really my parents' farm. I just use it freely.)

Now I took a cattle trail south along the bottom. I had gone only a few steps though, when the scene changed dramatically. Great trunks of felled trees lay at angles across a bare mud hollow, bright with sunlight falling through the broken canopy. It was a beaver pond, now dry. I crossed its margin easily enough, but southward beyond its low dam I found a confusing jumble of very uneven ground, branches and logs, tangled vegetation, and haphazard trampling that never resolved itself into a reliable trail. The banks of the old winding streambed were carved up by frequent beaver "runs" (narrow deep ditches) and tunnels which had collapsed in places. As I ducked under a felled tree that hadn't fallen all the way, I realized with a shock that this was no longer a place where you would want to ride a horse. Was my memory reliable - did we ride here sometimes? I felt a guilty twinge at the thought that others may have ridden here sometimes, unconcerned about property lines, comfortable in traditions of use much older than my family's ownership of this place. If they did - and they certainly could have come here often without our notice - what did they think of the beaver works that we brought with our dam?

As I struggled on, past more dry beaver ponds and over more low dams, I noticed hoofprints in the mud and trampling in the grass, and still no trail. Suddenly I understood its demise. The problem was the pace of change. Trails shift, always, as trees fall, as soil slips, as shrubs grow up; when a new obstacle arises, the cattle and deer just push around it, and one animal follows another until a new path is formed. But here, the new obstacles were thrown up thick and fast, faster than the trail could weave itself around them.

Ah, I thought: the pace of change. This beaver problem was, at its root, no different than many, if not most, environmental problems. Nature responds to change; life goes on, and springs up new and different and wonderful all the same; but when the change is rapid, the response from nature can seem chaotic, inhospitable, or even violent.

Humans are certainly not the only living creatures that create rapid changes in their own environments. Obviously, beavers do. I found myself thinking about disease organisms, too, and how some of them bring about their own swift demise by killing their hosts. There is no need - and probably no advantage - to think of humans as uniquely self-destructive. Quite the opposite, I mused: it might be worth noticing how the consequences fall on any living thing that tips the gentle flow of its surroundings into a freefall. Being a part of the web of life is no guarantee of a safety net.

All the same, as I slowly picked my way southward, I marvelled unhappily at the long reach of the effects of that dam. Who would have guessed it? I might have imagined subtle changes in the moisture regime, and maybe some differences in the way tree seedlings got established, very slowly changing the downstream forest. But I never dreamed of changes so swift, so large, and so far.

I tired of my sad journey. I wanted to find the place where high-bush cranberries grew, to see if they were as abundant and advanced here as where I'd seen them earlier. But even that desire wasn't enough to keep me pushing south; not when I noticed a trail leading up the east bank. I gazed up it, trying to decide if it was trustworthy. Could it be just a beaver trail? Inviting, those trails, but fickle, petering out at the limit of the beavers' logging operations, with half the slope still to be climbed and nothing but dense hazelnut on every side.

I risked it. Soon I was standing, panting, heart pounding, leaned against a smallish black poplar, looking at the expanse of hazelnut understory above. No more trail.

Last time I made this mistake, I had a group of Mom's relatives with me, and we pressed on, crashing through that understory. It might have been the same beaver trail. It wasn't fun, at least not for me. I think some of the folks I was guiding astray actually enjoyed it, being so thoroughly out in the bush, and showing each other how rugged they were.

This time I turned back down. Partway, I was drawn to a great old tree. I leaned against it, and suddenly, awareness of its history washed over me. Here it had stood, through storms and snows, through the stillness of frozen winters and the pulsing riots of - how many springs? I moved in close against it, grateful for its strength. For a moment I could relax from my struggle with gravity on that steep slope. I wondered what it meant to the tree, if anything, to feel my weight against its trunk. I wrapped my arms around it, my fingers finding fitting places in the deep grooves of its rough bark. Never had I felt like this - well, never towards a tree! I laid my cheek against it, and stretched my neck to feel more of that bark touching my skin.

After a while I shifted my weight back onto my own feet, and looked up the trunk, trying to decide which kind of poplar it was. There were lichens at eye level, and just above I noticed the tiny delicate spore capsules of a moss. How very tiny they looked, against the bark of that great tree!

At last I moved on down the beaver trail, back to the bottom, back to the jumble of logs and branches, bush and rank grass, beaver runs and bits of old trail. I rationed my water and let my mind wander over a life that seems, these days, just as jumbled and tangled as that ravine bottom.

Suddenly one of those bits of old trail seemed to grow firm and smooth and familiar beneath my feet. That is what I noticed first: the smoothing of my footing. So striking was the change, that I dropped whatever thought I had been busy with, and looked around for the reason. I saw it at once: I was south of the beavers' work.

A few steps further, and a hawk streaked by above, moving with easy skill among the closely-spaced trunks of the poplars. A Cooper's hawk, perhaps. And only a moment later, a flurry of motion and sound on the path ahead resolved itself into the oddish outline of a ruffed grouse living up to its name. It occurred to me that this sudden abundance of birds was no accident. I could feel the difference in the forest here; the canopy was closed above, and the understory around me was slightly more open and variable. It was a friendly place.

A good path up out of the ravine soon presented itself, but I passed it by. The walk along the bottom was a joy again, a joy that reached all the way back to my teenage ramblings, untouched by disappointment.

I found the high-bush cranberries, laden with berries still mostly white. I came to a richly grassy place, and just below it, water trickled out of the gravel and flowed a little way along the streambed before sinking out of sight again.

Now I was ready. A little below the spring, a very good path led up the east bank, and I climbed, satisfied. My gaze lifted to the ridge high above, and I realized that this was Mom's ridge, the place where she says she'd like her ashes scattered.

I pictured that final moment of goodbye, and saw with wonder how happy and peaceful it could be. Mom's ashes would come home to a place that she loved without demanding anything of it, without aspiring that it become anything other than just what it was. There would be no distracting symbols of things that she accomplished, no sad unspoken thoughts of things she could not finish. Just her love, her freedom, and the beauty of this place.

I wondered if God approved of these thoughts. Before I even framed that question in my mind, I felt a rush of loving presence, seeming to say that approval really didn't enter into the matter. God was there embracing me - no, not even that far away. Looking out through my eyes and taking in my view with wondering love.

Yet close behind that feeling was a thought of suffering women, unspeakably suffering, trapped in a world of war and violence, of torture and rape and hunger and fear. I hardly noticed the rest of the climb. At the ridge-top, in the delicious breeze, I turned back to marvel at the great green trough of forest canopy below, but soon I turned away down a gentle grassy slope to the east, my mind full of the vague and awful plight of nameless women. I stopped and prayed for someone, that the living spirit might strengthen her to lift her broken body from its torment - to lift it, or to let it go, or to let it be. The prayer felt right and powerful at that moment, and yet now I cannot seem to put even the gist of it into words, and even the idea of it feels somehow false and contrived.

But after that point, my gaze and my thoughts were free again, and I enjoyed the simple satisfaction of reading the landscape in a not-so-familiar corner of the pasture and knowing just where to look for a trail through an aspen bluff. I crossed an area of tame hay, moving back towards the highland of our home quarter. Something on the steep slope above the hayfield caught my eye: a doe, moving swiftly downhill, but not in flight. The wind was towards her, and it amazed me that she came on down the slope, apparently unaware of my presence. She was moving almost directly towards me, but slightly to my left, and as she reached the lower ground, a low knoll hid her from my view. I resumed my walk, and when I came past the knoll, she was nowhere to be seen.

I climbed the ridge she had descended, but slowly, pausing often, drinking up the last of my water a few swallows at a time. It occurred to me that this was the ridge where Garth and I had sat, some years ago, at one of those times when things were particularly rough between us. Did we decide anything? The memory didn't offer any answer to that; just a vision of Garth's sadly earnest, hopeful face.

The saddle behind the crest of the ridge had nearly closed in with trees since then. I was moving faster, more purposefully, aware of the approaching supper hour. My thoughts became more purposeful, too, and I asked myself what I need.

My answer: I need a clear and simple path. No, I thought, not clear and simple.

Strait.

Notice the spelling: no "gh." Strait is a different word, and it has nothing to do with the shortest distance between two points.

It means "narrow."

As I imagined blogging about "strait" versus "straight," I found myself grinding my teeth. I couldn't be sure, but I suspected I'd been free of that tense habit for most of my walk.

I thought about one of my recent sermons, in which I explained my discovery that the "straight and narrow way" is not biblical. The way that Jesus spoke about was narrow, yes, but he never said it would or should be straight.

I need a narrow path, a deer-and-cattle path, just wide enough for my feet as I pass along my way. Anything more is a distraction, extra maintenance, a temptation to go sideways.

Now all I need to do is find that path.

Don't Miss the Music . . .

. . . like I missed Forget. I hear it was great. But I won't miss the Kenosee Kitchen Party! Here's the concert line-up (scroll down past the old news about Forget). See you there!

We Got Rain!

A big storm went through - six tenths in a hurry. The whole driveway was running half an inch deep. Five miles north in the hills, I hear they got over an inch. Hallelujah! Everything looks better now. That drought was drying out my very soul. Now I feel like singing!

There was a lightning strike very close. Tzz-BANG! B's phone is out across the street, so maybe it was that close. I hear there was also a strike at an oil well south of town. A couple of trucks went tearing out that way. I hope all is well.

In the lull after the first five tenths, I went out to check on things and found hardly any water in the rain barrel. I got up on the stepladder, with all that lightning blasting around, and unclogged the downspout. Now the barrel is mostly full - not quite, but I can't complain. Hallelujah again!

Hope, Heartache, and Hoodoos

Light and shadow.
Chance and millenia, layered.
The sad beauty of barrenness.

I was surprised to find that that gray layer I'd been seeing in the valley banks was not clay, but sandstone. Some things are more solid than they seem.

*******

James and I happened on these hoodoos east of Drumheller by accident, after he decided he didn't want any more sightseeing and picked the shortest road back to the ranch house in the sandhills. We had been to Penhold, near Red Deer, Alberta, to see Ruth's graduation from her music program at the Air Cadet Summer Training Centre. The plan was to pick her up from there, but she was asked to stay on for another three weeks. Then we went to Calgary to put Garth on the plane to Nepal, and visit with Cathy and John and their boys. The bunch of us made the short trip out to Calaway Park, and I had some fun there in spite of my aversion to the whole concept of a piece of land dedicated to parking lots, power rides and junk food. I still like a Ferris Wheel. I took it easy, letting James decide when it was time to go, and then we headed for Drumheller, back to the badlands where we had camped overnight on the way out. I thought we would camp again, and see the dinosaur museum, and play on the elaborate splash-pad, and climb up to the lookout in the jaws of the giant T.-rex statue. But in the end, all we did was eat and drive on. The hoodoos were a fortuitous treat along the way, and then we drove and drove, with James lapsing into sleep, and me enjoying a classic country station on the radio, and a thunderstorm leading the way across those wide, high plains.

What's the title about? Hope and heartache?

I'm not sure, but it has something to do with the time away, and the coming home. And something to do with my morose musings today, over at The Daily Bed. This post started out as just a link to that one, and then it needed something, so I went looking for a picture, and found the hoodoos.

And now I remember a song.

Longing for the Badlands
© Laura Herman 2002

This little private lawn,
screened from all beyond,
and rich with all the perfume of the flowers
where he led me on his arm,
smiling full of charm,
and told me all his treasure would be ours...

Oh, the fountain flowing free,
the arch of ancient trees,
the hedges round the stately formal garden.
It's a lovely place to be,
or so they all tell me,
but here I stand, longing for the badlands.

I come to meet the dawn,
calling from beyond;
I watch the distant cloudbanks turning golden.
Those tints of rose and grey,
they look so far away
like the morning light on claybanks in the high plains.

Oh, the fountain flowing free,
the arch of ancient trees,
the hedges round the stately formal garden.
It's a lovely place to be,
or so they all tell me,
but here I stand, longing for the badlands.

The fountain and the stream
whisper in my dreams.
In my heart I hear the wind across the badlands.
Though I stand beside a pool,
there's a desert in my soul
and his footsteps on the cobbles bring no gladness.

Oh, the fountain flowing free,
the arch of ancient trees,
the hedges round the stately formal garden.
It's a lovely place to be,
or so they all tell me,
but here I stand, longing for the badlands.

Sand Hills

Mule deer on a dune partially revegetated with lance-leaved psoralea or scurf-pea (Psoralea lanceolata)

Alright, here's a bit about where I've been lately: the Great Sand Hills, in southwestern Saskatchewan. I find it fascinating that you can see the outline of the sandhill area on satellite imagery and on landcover maps derived from it. So much of southern Saskatchewan is in cropland that the major native grassland areas show up in contrast. One of these areas is the Great Sand Hills, where the soil is too sandy for annual crop production, and much of the topography is stabilized dunes, too choppy for any sort of cultivation. To me, the outline of the area looks a bit like a chess knight, or the upper part of a seahorse, in profile, facing right. See if you can see it on the landcover map when you zoom in on southwestern Saskatchewan. Look for a pinkish area south of the big bend in the South Saskatchewan River west of Lake Diefenbaker. Once you see it on there, try it on Google Earth.

I joined the Plant Team, doing rare plant searches and range health assessment as part of the Great Sand Hills Regional Environmental Study, for ten days in the latter part of July. The team, with somewhat shifting membership as knowledgeable people were available, had been living at this rented ranch house in the west central part of the sandhills since late May.


I took the last available bedroom. Hmmm - am I going to like this? Maybe once I take over the bed.

At least I had my guitar along.

Actually, I abandoned this room partly through my stay, and rolled out my sleeping bag in the basement rec room. Others did the same, and soon somebody commented about the refugee camp in the basement. It was just too hot upstairs in the early evening, when we were trying to get to sleep so that we could wake up and look lively at 4:30 a.m. At first we tried to leave the house at about six, but we gradually worked it back even earlier, so that we were arriving on our sites at about six. By eight o'clock in the morning, you could already feel the heat, and by the time we finished our last site of the day in the early afternoon, we were really needing some shade. Or an air conditioned truck. The drive back to the ranch was good for that. Often it was forty-five minutes; for some sites it was double that. "Oh, I drive a truck for the environment . . ."


At least I got to hang my laundry out to dry. I was amused and disturbed by the inconsistencies of our situation. At home I haven't even got around to putting up a clothesline, but I drive a tiny car, or bike, or walk. Out at this ranch, the plant people had brought along eco-friendly cleaning products and strung up a clothesline, and someone objected to the plastic sandwich bags I bought in the convenience store on a trip into town because I had forgotten to bring a reusable sandwich box - and we spent our days driving monstrous trucks all up and down the countryside. (Well, that and walking all up and down our sites.)

There were reasons, of course. We had to have vehicles with high clearance, to keep from dragging bottom or starting the crispy-crunchy-dry grass on fire. And part of the study design involved spreading the work over the whole area through the season, to avoid bias, so we couldn't just start at one end and camp our way across the area to save on driving.

Couldn't we just skip the study altogether? One team member was keen to see this study help to "keep them out" - to protect the sandhills from gas development. I reminded her that most of us depend on this gas to heat our homes each winter. As we discussed it further, she was shocked to learn that gas and oil development is often unwanted by landowners, but ultimately there is nothing they can do to stop it. If they refuse the developer's offer for a surface lease, and try to fight it, then an arbitration board will step in and tell them what they will be paid for the surface lease. They have no choice about giving a lease. Stepping back to look at the bigger picture, if some ranchers and environmentalists and concerned citizens band together and get some tighter planning restrictions on gas development in the sandhills, how long will it last? Eventually the pressure to get that gas will be too great, and the restrictions will be lifted.

But maybe the study will suggest some ways to do the development better, with less impact. I don't know. That wasn't my reason for being there. I just had fun wandering up and down sandhills, seeing the 360-degree vistas from the crests of dunes, bantering with my teammates. More than once I said I would do this work for free. When W saw me struggling up the side of a blowout, throwing the quadrat frame ahead of me and then lunging upward on all fours, he asked if I still felt the same way, or if maybe they weren't paying me enough for this. But I was still happy, just a bit embarrassed that I had tried to scramble up the steep and sliding sand instead of taking a long way around where the slope was easier, and feeling foolish with him standing up there watching me.

I meant to take the camera along on one of our workdays, but I was always too focussed on the stuff I needed for work. Even at that, I forgot my lunch one day. W and S gave me parts of theirs, and it was the best lunch I had in the whole ten days! Anyway, the only pictures I have are from the immediate vicinity of the ranch house where we stayed. They'll still give you some idea of what it was like.

The work involved a lot of walking, back and forth in a set pattern across a site, while scanning all the vegetation in a 5 m wide swath for rare plants. Sometimes the site was flat open grassland, but sometimes it looked more like this.


Or this.


One site I recall had mostly creeping juniper at ground level, plus waist- to shoulder-high wolf willow (silverberry, Elaeagnus commutata) throughout. Then there was a site down in a broad low area where water table supports poplars and water birch - making it very difficult to see our flags to keep on track with the search pattern.

Once, while filling out a site form, W asked for my estimate of the % cover of a speargrass, Stipa comata. I said the estimate varies depending on what the botanist is wearing on their ankles.

I loved it all.

Some views of the dune north of the ranch house:




And looking back from the dune toward the ranch house:

I noticed a lot of terrain like this, where there is a low flat, bordered by higher, very rough land, known as "choppy dune." The ranch buildings seem to huddle at the edge of the flat, taking shelter from the sand ridges but staying out of them. The loneliness of the place was very appealing to me, as long as I didn't start thinking about what it would take to survive there, independently.




One night I stayed alone at the ranch. At the end of the ten-day shift, some of the team members were finished, and some had a four-day break before returning for another shift. All left for their homes or holidays, except for me. I stayed on to wait for Garth and James to pick me up so we could travel on westward to see Ruth's graduation from her three-week music program at the Air Cadet Summer Training Centre at Penhold, Alberta.

Something woke me - perhaps the wind slamming a bedroom door upstairs.

Soundtrack: crickets.


Look away from that yard light, and what do you see?

I see a glint on the horse trailers. Nothing more. No distant traffic, or yard lights, or glow from a town - nothing. Just the dark of the sandhill night.

Clutter

It was a disturbing homecoming. For that matter, it was a disturbing time away. Many revelations, as people newly met asked about parts of my background that I hadn't bothered or dared to think about in a long time. Between conversations, there were hours of quiet pacing through the grassland, searching the vegetation for rare plants. That activity demands a certain level of attentiveness, allowing self-reflection to percolate gently below the surface, but preventing the conscious mind from barging in on the process with a lot of willful direction.

I came to a better understanding of a conflict in a work relationship some years ago. I realized that those I worked under had mistaken my perfectionism for competence, and put me into a leadership role that was beyond me. I didn't have the experience to recognize competence in my team members - I didn't even know what competence might look like in that kind of work - and my perfectionist approach turned into obnoxious hounding when I tried to take responsibility for the work of others.

I could do that job a lot better now. If I wanted to.

Another thing I noticed in those hours between conversations: my conversations include a lot of complaining about Garth. I don't like to hear myself talk like that. What is wrong?

I already knew that we need more time together. I've been working on that. Him being on the other side of the planet makes it tougher, right now - he's back in Nepal for three weeks. But in his email today, he suggested a plan for a mini-holiday on my upcoming birthday. He's working on it, too.

But there was another revelation that emerged from the first day or so of being home. The place was a mess. An abnormal mess. Or maybe not so abnormal, but ever so noticeable in contrast to the spacious, uncluttered feeling of that big ranch-house in the sandhills where we all lived with just what we needed for the short time we were there, and did our best to keep our stuff out of one another's way.

I wanted my home to be clean.

For the first time in years, that was at the top of my mind. Maybe because my mind had been reset by the two-week break from any habits or obligations here. Maybe because I'd done a bit of cleaning at the ranch house and found it very satisfying. I felt like a new person, eager to make a home, instead of nodding a grudging acknowledgement to that duty while hurrying on to something else.

Now other needs and tasks and habits (like blogging) are rising up again, and I'm becoming resigned to the mess. No! Don't give in! Clean the bedroom, today! (You have to realize that cleaning the bedroom doesn't mean dusting the light fixture and running the vaccuum through. It means facing countless sideways-tipping and intermingling piles of who-knows-what, piles that take up more floor space than they leave empty. It means sorting, dealing with, throwing out, storing . . . you see, the bedroom has been my place to put what I can't leave lying around the rest of the house. But to leave it in the bedroom is probably even worse.)

Blogging. It feels like a chore, like an impossibly huge chunk out of every day. I have pictures and stories and ideas for posts even from before I left, but there are times when I just want to shove it all sideways and do something real. Not to have to listen to myself for a while.

And so I come to realize that a good deal of my complaining about Garth is really just a symptom of all this mess. There is a problem between us, yes, indeed. A big sprawling jumbled problem, and there are only so many times you can step over it all for a hug, before somebody trips and grumbles.

So if I seem preoccupied and quiet these days, you can smile and imagine me cleaning. Picture it as clearly as you can, and maybe you'll help it happen!

And in the back of my mind, I have a victory project. With the clutter out of the way, I can tackle refinishing the hardwood floors. I've been dreading that project, because I just couldn't see a way to keep the dust out of all my stuff. The idea of moving a lot of the stuff out, permanently, is a help. But the breakthrough was a comment Eleutheros made somewhere, about using scrapers instead of sandpaper. I boldly wondered - could you do that for a whole floor? Absolutely. I've never sharpened anything, so the prospect of sharpening my scraper after every ten square feet is enough to make me tremble a bit, but I know how to steady myself and carry on. No dust! Now if I can just think of a way to keep that cleanly scraped floor clean while I finish the whole thing bit by bit . . .

A Food Shortage for Thought

Lester Brown looks at the accelerating contest between cars and people for food.

I'm not sure I share his optimism about wind electric alternatives.

And I notice he doesn't mention the option of leaving the car parked.

But it's one more wake-up call, anyway.

Setting the Record . . .

. . . flat.

View northward from the TransCanada Highway between Regina and Moose Jaw.

This is the baseline, folks. No hills.

Early Tomatoes

Wow - I grew these! (With thanks to Mary Milligan for the excellent tomato plants from her greenhouse.) Picked yesterday, August 1st. Delicious.