Earth Hour, 2012

I'm writing my blog earlier today because this evening at 8:30 pm we turn off our computers and almost everything electrical to observe Earth Hour.  Thousands of cities around the globe are doing the same, beginning with Auckland in New Zealand;Sydney,Australia where the Opera House will go dark; Paris, France -- the City of Lights will be the City of Darkness; London, where even the Queen will flick her switches off in Buckingham Palace. Above us, an astronaut will be filming the results.

Not much will happen in little Seymour, Wisconsin that will show up in space, but I will do my best. The wood tick in the jar candle finally is demised.  I can light the candle and read by its dim light.  

So all you who are reading this, can you spare an hour to observe what global warming is doing to our planet?  It  probably won't change anything but your attitude, but that is a start.   

Rain But Not Snow

Last night, the forecast was rain turning into snow.

The trouble with the unseasonably warm March is that plants came up and started blooming.  In March, 2011, only two flowers were blooming.  Right now, there are eleven kinds of flowers blooming, plus the asparagus and rhubarb are up. All of that is very nice, but when a bad frost hits, all the glory is in danger.

Yesterday, I took some photos.  There are around a thousand daffodils interspersed with hyacinths.

 The cherry tree is in full bloom but all the petals could easily be wiped out in a snowstorm.

It would be a shame to lose the blossoms, but mine is an ornamental cherry tree, so there won't be any fruit anyhow. Of greater concern is the pear tree.  

Three years ago, after waiting over a decade after its planting, I harvested the first Bartlett pear.  It was wonderful.  The following year, there were two pears, and last year four.  This year, however, the pear tree is full of buds.  If the tree does in fact flower, if the mason and bumble bees go to work, and if the hard frosts stay away, I could have a bushel of pears by late September .   

Last night, the rains did come, but not the snow.  The next few nights will be cool, but we may be past the worst, and of course, Sunday is April 1.  

There still could be blizzards, there could be killing frosts.  I am keeping my fingers crossed, and enjoying the flowers as they are.

***

Wade Peterson's latest short story, "The Mechanic" is at Black Coffee Fiction http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com

I foresee this being a series of short stories about two unlikely superheroes.  You never know with Wade.  

Ticks

After Gary and I came away from the Deer Ridge State Wildlife Area, we had wood ticks.  His first one made its presence know in the van before we got to the sturgeon camp. I picked it off him and threw it out the window.

At sturgeon camp Gary found a tick, and I found two.  We were tied.  Then while we were at sturgeon camp, Gary felt one crawling around when he was trying to nap.  When we came home I found one attached to my scalp and then we were tied three-three.  Gary is good at dispatching them usually by squishing them using thumb and fingernails.

I woke up that night to find one sticking on a thigh. That put me ahead in the tick department, but what do you do with a tick in the middle of the night. I pulled it off and knotted it up in a tissue. I wasn't going to wake Gary up.  I suppose the logical thing would have been to take it downstairs and slice and dice it with a knife, but I was tired.  I looked around for a place to store it.  There on my bed stand was a jar candle.

I put that wood tick in the jar and forgot about it.  Today, it is still crawling around in there.  I suppose she is looking for either someone else to bite or a nice place to lay her eggs.  I have no idea.

For the time being, she will stay in there.  It's sort of like watching an ant farm.  Do I feel bad at leaving her in there?  Not really, if she comes out, she gets sliced and diced.  Execution or prison.  Those are her choices right now.  There are no ticks in my back yard and I want to keep it that way.

Sturgeon Guard - 2012, Part 3

A few years ago, we had an unusually warm week in November, so two days before Thanksgiving, Gary and I went camping in a tent at Potawatomi State Park in Door County.  The weather was fine but we discovered that that close to the winter solstice, the nights were just too long.  By 4:30 it was dark.  You can only sit in front of a fire pit for so long.  We finally went to a nearby picnic shelter with electricity, plugged in a computer and watched a DVD of the Deadwood series. Not exactly what camping should be.

A long night is what we found with March sturgeon guarding right after the spring equinox. We arrived on site at 6:30 pm and set up some lawn chairs at the river's edge, as we had done so many times when we guarded in late April.

But by the time the chairs were in place the sun had set and it was getting cold, very cold, made even colder by the river damp.  This was private property and we were not allowed to start any fires. We did have a camp stove to make tea or hot chocolate and of course the bag lunches provided by the DNR.

The sturgeon were wildly splashing against the rocks, but we couldn't see them unless we used our flashlights. It was a dark evening, with only a thumbnail sliver of a moon above.

As it got colder, we retreated into the front seats of the van.  We could watch from there.  We read books in our Nooks, and I wrote notes for a short story I'm working on.

At the back of the van is a bed with two quilts.  When one of us was tired we crawled into the back for a nap.  I woke from my first nap when I heard voices.  There was Mike, the DNR warden, checking on the sturgeon, who were in the middle of their orgy.  We found out later that the Pines was the most active site so far in the spawning season.  Mike loves his job, especially these nights under the stars.  We were in such a remote area that the heavens were laid out before us. You can't see the Milky Way in the city, but out there in the boonies, we could see our galaxy so clearly.

At 10:30, Gary took his nap.  It got colder and colder in the front seat, but I had on warm clothes. I used the little light Gary got me that attaches to the Nook.  Every so often, I took my flashlight on patrol to stretch my legs. The sturgeon never slowed down.  A little after midnight, I woke Gary up and took my turn on the cot.  He let me sleep until 3:00 then he took another turn.  Before we turned off the lights, I put on warmer socks and thicker gloves.

The night wore on.  The stars gradually disappeared and then the robins began to sing just before 6:00.  I woke Gary up.  He made tea on the camp stove in the gray dawn.  We were just packing our gear when the next shift of guards arrived, a man and his wife, who also have done this for years.

We returned to the sturgeon camp for French toast and sausages, made our report and we were done unless the spawning season goes on.  If that happens, we'll be back next Sunday for another stint.  It isn't likely, but the ladies and gentlemen sturgeon make the decisions, not humans.  If not next Sunday, we'll see them in 2013.

We have begun our camping season.  So many more adventures to come.  

Sturgeon Guard - 2012 - Part Two

Being a volunteer sturgeon guard comes with some perks.  We are expected to watch our rock piles for twelves hours, either in a day shift or night shift, but we are repaid with three meals and...a hat!

At the sturgeon camp, we ate a lovely meal of ham, vegetables, potatoes, and cherry crisp for dessert.  Next we packed a midnight lunch:  sandwiches with cold cuts and cheese, fruit, chips, and candy bars.   Then we met with the "sturgeon general" to get our assignments.  By now the day shift was coming back and reporting how active the sturgeon were at their sites.  The wardens added their observations.  Now the sturgeon general had a good idea where the fish were and made her assignments accordingly.  We asked for and got The Pines, our favorite site. (We've guarded there three times.) Then we received our official baseball caps, this year navy blue.  Each year, the cap is a new color.  We  will add this one to those hanging from nails on our walls.

The Pines isn't far from the sturgeon camp.  On private land, it is not open to sturgeon gawkers, who go to the  banks of the Wolf at New London and Shiocton. The only people we would see during our twelve hours would be the property owners and a warden.  Gary parked the van on the ridge that overlooks our charges.  To the south of the ridge is a slough, or a bayou as the owner describes it.  Here there are waterfowl, and one year, sandpipers, stilts and other shore birds.  One year, after an especially snowy winter, the slough was entirely underwater.  That spring, Gary and I canoed into it, scaring the geese.

On the north side of our ridge there's the Wolf River. The DNR brought in cement blocks to serve as rocks along their stretch, and the sturgeon love them.  On this side of the ridge, in the swamp across the river, there are sandhill cranes, mallards, and the sweet singing of the white throated sparrow.   Most years there is a kingfisher or two but it was cold this night, and they must have gone looking for warmer territory.

My first job is to go to the bank and call down to the sturgeon "Hello, Ladies!" welcoming them back.  They ignore me, of course. They are busy laying their eggs by thrashing against the rocks as their consorts, the much smaller males, thrash as well  as they spread their sperm to fertilize the eggs.   It is a wild sexual orgy, and we voyeurs get to watch them.

It is difficult to get a good photo of the sturgeon because the water is brown at this time of year because of the tannin from the leaves that fall in the river. Even if one can get a photo, it doesn't show the size of the female fish, often six feet or longer.

The sturgeon were busy re-producing, and we began to get ready for our night guard.

Sturgeon Guard - 2012 - Part One

We originally signed up to guard sturgeon on April 15,with two alternate dates.   When the weather turned warm, we received an e-mail from the Department of Natural Resources, asking us to move up to April 8.  But the sturgeon had their own timetable, which is based on the temperature in the Lake Winnebago/Wolf River system.  When the water temperature reaches 53 degrees F., the massive fish start moving upstream to spawn.

The weather kept getting warmer and warmer, as did the water temperature.  Gary kept a careful eye on the reports the DNR put out so it was no big surprise when we were contacted to go to the Sturgeon Camp near Shiocton yesterday.

Sturgeon exist all over the northern hemisphere, but they've been fished practically out of existence in most places for their eggs, which are served as caviar.  The same thing nearly happened in the United States.  When Russian caviar became more rare, German immigrants realized they could use the giants that swam the Great Lakes.  They took thirteen thousand fish out of the lakes a year.

However, by 1915, Wisconsin realized that the sturgeon could be fished out of existence and placed a moratorium on fishing them except for a closed spring season.  Poaching continued to be a problem, but these days the fish are protected by a cadre of volunteers who guard the spawning sites.  Almost a hundred years after the first protections, the Wolf River system has the only healthy population of sturgeon in the world. These days, you are likely to find visitors from foreign countries who are studying the Wisconsin system.

Our sturgeon are huge, the females often six feet or longer. Some of them are likely as old as a hundred years.   The smaller sturgeon are usually male. As a species, they have been around for around 150 million years, according to fossil records.  They were on earth before the dinosaurs, survived them and continued to swim and spawn.  They are older than we were, and should we manage to kill ourselves off, they would probably continue on as if we were never here.  

We began two hours early to look at some of the other natural areas.  We started at Van Patten Road to look at the ducks and geese, but things were quiet there. We went on to the Deer Creek State Wildlife Area.  We heard sandhill cranes but thought we had come up blank for critters until we realized later we had picked up some wood ticks, three for him, two for me. (Except that I just discovered a third firmly affixed to my scalp in my hair an hour ago.)

At Koepke Park, we watched the walleye fishermen and women maneuvering their boats around the landing. They were not doing well at all, because the walleye season usually ends with the sturgeon run.

Finally we came to the Sturgeon Camp and our little adventure began.

This Means War!

Back in the 1950's, some guy whose name I can't recall wrote a book called "Momism" in which he blamed all of society's ills on American mothers. Remember, these were the good old days, in the eyes of the Tea Party and their ilk.

About that time, the Seymour Lutherans had an intern fresh out of the seminary. He was to spend a year here learning how to be a minister.  It fell to him to preach the sermon on Mother's Day, the third holiest day on the church calendar.

Mothers came to church dressed in their finest, with fancy hats, corsages, and their progeny around them on the pew. It was their day to be honored and that's what they expected.   Instead, the intern, who seems to have read the book, lit into motherhood, listing all the ways the moms had fallen away from their Christian heritage.  The church got quieter and quieter as this tirade hit the women.  It was May, but the pink and reddened faces had nothing to do with sun tans. There was little handshaking after the service.

My clan met afterwards at my grandmother's house for the usual chicken dinner. Grandma Pearl was a strong willed woman and though she couldn't be on the church council being female and all, everyone knew my grandfather pretty much had his orders when he went to meetings.

As I recall, all of her children, four of them, and all of her grandchildren were there.  We were a pretty quiet lot, waiting for her to explode, but she calmly went about dishing out the food.  Finally, the topic of the intern was raised.  Someone, probably my father, got to wondering if interns were ordained before they could preach.

"I don't know if this one was sworn in," she said, "but he's going to be sworn out."  It took the young man another two years to reach ordination.  I do not think he got a good report from the Lutherans here in Seymour.

It's over sixty years later, and once again, Momism is back.  This past week, the assistant leader of the Wisconsin state senate, Glenn Grothman (GOP) started a bill that said a single parent (and he clarified that to mean mothers) were guilty of child abuse.  The child should be removed from the home.

That was outrageous enough, but his co-sponsor in the assembly, Don Pridemore (also GOP) suggested that an abused woman should try to remember what she loved about her husband as he slapped her around, saying it could help. (Pridemore, incidentally, is a Lutheran.)

There are those who say there is no war against women in this country.  Perhaps not in this country, but just in Wisconsin?

I am waiting for the recall election.  As my grandmother would say, it's time for these men to be sworn out.