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Changes.


Time may change me.....

As of right now (or something very close to it, anyway) I am a full
time resident of the tree farm.

So?

Well, that all remains to be seen. For the time being it means the
repugnant necessity of needing to pack up a large bunch of ****, load
it all on a truck, move it nearly two hundred miles, and then take it
all off the truck again and put it into a storage locker. No, it
ain't lung cancer or a brain tumor.....both of those are treatable to
one degree or another.

The better news is that it also means no more daily megalopoloid
insanity. Sixteen years should be long enough to convince any sane
person (or anyone wishing to be sane, for that matter) that that ain't
no kinda place to live. It took me just a couple of visits before I
moved there. But such are the vicissitudes of life; we find ourselves
in places we never hoped to be in and then spend a long time wondering
how we got there and what it's going to take to get out. Sort of like
Gilligan, I suppose.

I got a post office box in Sparta today; number 303. Last time I had
one of those was in Black, Missouri.....box number 2. One might
suppose from this that Sparta is bigger than Black. This is so. One
might also suppose that not a whole lot of mail has traveled through
either post office in the past couple of centuries. Well, this would
depend on just how one scores such things.....but I'm betting that I
was not the first person to rent those respective boxes in either
place. Could be wrong, though.

I also found out that getting mail delivered directly to the tree farm
(which has evidently never been done....despite several centuries of
European, and European derived, contact, settlement and influence) is
simply a matter of putting up a mailbox, filling out a very small
form, talking to the carrier on whose route it is, and waiting for
mail to show up. Who'da thunk that ANYTHING managed by a United
States government agency could be that simple and direct, ainna?
Nevertheless, I'm going to be a very busy boy for the foreseeable
future.....not much time for undirected play. And then there's that
whole stupid clock change thingy (again!) Saturday night.

Time has an uncanny ability to work on multiple levels at the
same.....um.....well, the same time. Here in the upper Great Lakes
region it shows remarkable decorum (and good sense) at least insofar
as the calendrical and climatological varieties are in close accord.
Taking things in the order in which they will appear from this day
forward, December 21 is a very close approximation to when what is
recognizably winter will begin. For the remaining seven weeks or so
till then, autumn will continue to wind down to the point at which it
is simply frozen out. The signs are already in the air, on the
ground, and, yes, most definitely in the trees. Terminal buds, so
long hidden by leaves and a nearly desperate longing for status quo,
are now unmistakably fully formed and prominently naked on the ends of
bare twigs. There is nothing much left alive on the ground.....only a
few bits of grass in protected and sunny glades. No snow has fallen
yet, but it could happen literally any minute now, and the frequent
frosts presage the inevitable. Soon the ground will be covered with a
white coverlet, only to be rudely exposed again by the bright sun.
But before too long the sun, hanging low in the sky, will be more a
symbol of hope than of power.

And thus matters will stand for roughly 90 days. And then the miracle
foretold and retold for millennia.....behold!.....will play out once
again. Persephone and all that ****.....or Jesus.....or any of
thousands of other resurrectionist myths.....all come true once
again. And then.....well, you know the rest of the story.....or
should, anyway. Just look at the calendar and ask your children (or
grandchildren, as the case may be) to explain solstices and equinoxes
to you.

By the time the next equinox comes around, I'll probably have burned a
couple of cords of firewood.....mixed oak, walnut, apple, cherry,
birch, and a bit of hickory. I'll also have cut a couple of cords for
next year, and a good deal of already dead and dried wood for the
remainder of this winter. Benjamin Franklin famously said that he who
cuts his own firewood is twice warmed.....which proves conclusively
that old Ben never prepared his own wood. If he had, he'd have known
that he who does so is at least three or four times warmed. I'll be
warm throughout the winter.....and the rest of the year as well.
Seems like a lot of work.....and a very large carbon footprint,
right? But each tree that comes down serves, at the very least, two
purposes; fuel and/or firewood and/or lumber and/or veneer, and chips
for mulch. As for the carbon footprint, all eighty acres of this farm
were once devoted to pasture and/or crops for the maintenance of dairy
herds. A tree farm, managed for sustainable yield in perpetuity (more
or less) represents a permanent carbon sequestration in the many
thousands of tons.....regardless of how much is shipped out as lumber
or burned as fuel. And, anyway, a house on this property or any
other in these climes has to be heated in one way or another.....and
direct solar heating is pretty much a joke in this part of the world.
Gas, oil, coal, wood, electric.....it all amounts to pretty much the
same thing.

Meanwhile, all other considerations aside, heating with wood in a
sustainable fashion dictates that there will always have to be a
certain amount of firewood in stock. No net difference in carbon
input and output. Neat, sweet, petite!

Heading toward the next equinox, the equation will lean slightly and
briefly toward the consumptive end, but the difference (in a not yet
mature "forest") will quickly be made up and exceeded by new growth as
the trees get ever larger in height, diameter, and crown and root
spread. Well, as long as the trees continue to grow and prosper, that
is. The fly in the ointment.

Things are changing. There are vastly more trees here in the coulee
country today than there were 80 or so years ago. But then, there
were vastly more trees here a century and a half ago than there are
today. In the interim, somebody cut them all down.....ALL of
them.....and planted corn and ****. Devastation on a cosmic scale.
Some of the damage has been mitigated.....but there's a long way to
go. But we may never get there. In fact, we almost certainly won't.

Last night, I started reading Charles E. Little's "the Dying of the
Trees." Not exactly a cheerful title. Even less so when one
considers that it is an accurate capsule description of what is
happening not only here in the upper Great Lakes, but all across North
America. Not only all across North America, but all over the world.
Little's first chapter is devoted to the all but complete demise of
the flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) throughout its native range,
which includes most of the U.S. east of the Mississippi, as a result
of an infestation by a fungus commonly known as anthracnose.....never
mind the details, you can find them if you want to. Chapter two, he
promises, is about the red spruce of Vermont. Then we move on to
California's "X-disease", etc., etc. I believe I've already mentioned
that we are challenged by both chestnut blight and butternut blight
here at the tree farm. Dutch Elm disease is famous worldwide. Gypsy
moths. Acid rain. Thousand canker disease. Emerald ash borer. White
pine blister rust.....the list goes on and on and on and on.....and
grows ever larger. Trees, and the forests they comprise, are in
serious trouble pretty much everywhere in the world where trees exist
at all. And it's getting worse.....everywhere. And that's critically
important for reasons which, if they are not perfectly obvious, you
should be very much ashamed of yourself.

It's a hell of a time to be moving to a tree farm!

......but I can't trace time

Wolfgang
so, what has all of this got to do with fly fishing? well, you know
how people are always saying there's no such thing as a stupid
question?