Ch ch ch

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?

On 11/4/2010 11:16 PM, Giles wrote:
Changes.
...


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?

congrats on exiting milwaukee for an environ i remember as more pleasing
to the senses, at least to my senses. if i had the balls or ability,
i'd do similarly and find my way to the nc mountains...til then, i'll
enjoy your notes from coulee country.

jeff

On 2010-11-04 23:16:02 -0400, Giles said:


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!

During the 40s and 50s, I can remember the Springfield, Mass. Park
Department cutting down deseased elm trees. They pulled up the stumps
and burned the wood/stumps in a land fill about a 1/2 from where I
lived. Almost all of the elm trees in America were destroyed. On
occasion I still see one that is healthy, but they are few.

Land that we own in Geogia has been denuded of pine trees thanks to the
Pine Bore Beetle. About 20 years ago there was a terrible drought in
Georgia. It weakened the pine trees and the beetle got a good start
wrecking its havoc. We still see dead pines in the area we now live.

The Asian long horn beetle has devastated hardwood trees in several
towns in Massachusetts. All the infected trees were on the tree-belt
lining streets in each town. To stop the spread, each tree was cut
down, its stump removed, and all the wood burned. It's deja vu all
over again; sixty years after the elms, these hardwoods are now
disappearing.

Flowering dogwoods, however, seem to be able to get by inspite of the
anthracnose. We have many on our property in both Massachusetts and
Georgia, and although we have lost one or two in both properties, they
seem to propagate enough to overcome any losses. The woods hereabout
are literally filled with healthy trees. Their blooms enchant in the
springtime, while their burgandy colored leaves brighten the most
dismal of autumn weather.

Joanne and I took great, if perverted, joy in making torches out of old
broom sticks and strips of rag and ridding trees of tent caterpillars.
Although the apple, maple and birch trees would survive these pests,
their "tents" were unsightly. Gypsy mouths have also invaded our
trees, but we found that if we sprayed them with a solution of just a
little dish washing fluid mixed with water in a spray bottle would kill
them without any colateral damage to the trees.

As you say, "It's a hell of a time to be moving to a tree farm!"

Good luck, and try not to freeze your ass off this winter.

Dave

On Nov 5, 7:40*am, jeff wrote:

congrats on exiting milwaukee for an environ i remember as more pleasing
to the senses, at least to my senses.

Thanks. It's hard to gauge to what extent your senses (and mine) are
shared by others. Most folks I have known make episodic (and
sometimes frequent) forays across the border into the other world,
whether they live in conurban environments or rural, but most also
seem to be content with living where they do.

if i had the balls or ability,
i'd do similarly and find my way to the nc mountains

One COULD boast of balls and ability.....but that would be
disingenuous. The truth is that, as has always been the case when
I've willingly made a lifestyle change, this was the result of a
simple convergence of opportunity and a lack of compelling reasons to
decline.


...til then, i'll
enjoy your notes from coulee country.

Well, that's one vote pro and (thus far) zero con. The ayes, for the
time being, have it.

Wolfgang

On Nov 5, 6:47*am, Giles wrote:
On Nov 5, 7:40*am, jeff wrote:

congrats on exiting milwaukee for an environ i remember as more pleasing
to the senses, at least to my senses.

Thanks. *It's hard to gauge to what extent your senses (and mine) are
shared by others. *Most folks I have known make episodic (and
sometimes frequent) forays across the border into the other world,
whether they live in conurban environments or rural, but most also
seem to be content with living where they do.

if i had the balls or ability,
i'd do similarly and find my way to the nc mountains

One COULD boast of balls and ability.....but that would be
disingenuous. *The truth is that, as has always been the case when
I've willingly made a lifestyle change, this was the result of a
simple convergence of opportunity and a lack of compelling reasons to
decline.

...til then, i'll
enjoy your notes from coulee country.

Well, that's one vote pro and (thus far) zero con. *The ayes, for the
time being, have it. * *

Wolfgang

Congratulations. It all sounds like this move will put you in a place
closer to where you want to be. It's a possibility that I believe many
of our ilk (Sportsmen, enviros, agropups etc) entertain but don't get
to experience. Not a day goes by that I don't mentally extend my own
farm groupie stays to full time, in my mind at least. Good luck

Dave

Wolfy talks a good story trees and this nature crap, but I know that
there is some INCREDIBLE fishing about a 2 miles away from where he is
currently living. Hmm, the drifter ends up in the driftless area.
Congrats Wolf. Now you just have to get Becky a spot up there.
Frank Reid

On Nov 5, 7:49*am, D. LaCourse wrote:


During the 40s and 50s, I can remember the Springfield, Mass. Park
Department cutting down deseased elm trees. *They pulled up the stumps
and burned the wood/stumps in a land fill about a 1/2 from where I
lived. *Almost all of the elm trees in America were destroyed. *On
occasion I still see one that is healthy, but they are few.

They say that as one ages short term memory turns to **** while, at
the same time, the brain manages to dredge up stuff that was not only
merely forgotten but never made an impresssion at all on
consciousness. Recent events lend credence to this theory. Your
story reminds me that I have occasionally wondered whence cometh my
love of trees. When I was a small boy Dutch Elm Disease was BIG
news.....the sort of thing that would have the talking heads on TV
waxing shrill about all sorts of idiotic nonsense today.....if their
keepers thought anybody at all gave a **** about trees and other such
animals.

I never made the connection before.

I remember seeing big trucks, loaded with enormous spraying apparati,
moving slowly down the streets, sending out hurricane velocity clouds
of atomized poisons (even at that tender age.....well before "Silent
Spring".....I understood that basking such glorious mists was probably
a bad idea) in a futile effort to control this great and deadly
mystery. The elms made cool shady tunnels of what would soon be
exposed as nasty concrete and asphalt deserts. The spraying raised
hopes, and doubtless the average income of what passed for arborists
and sylviculturists in that day, but did little to stem the tide of
destruction. The elms disappeared.

But not all of them. I read somewhere, back about twenty or thirty
years ago, that the disease actually only killed about half of the
American elms in the country.....yeah, "only" half. If true (and I
have no good reason to lean one way or the other on this question) it
would appear that it was predominantly the urban half that got
hammered, because the urban trees did disappear.....mostly. Oddly,
though, as I paid more attention, I began to see more and more
individual lone trees and even some streets and avenues with multiple
ancient (well, relatively so, anyway) trees still lining the streets.
There are still literally thousands of mature and apparently healthy
American elms on the streets of the Milwaukee metropolitan area. And
there are a few here on the tree farm as well. There are more dead
ones than live ones here, but they are mostly recent casualties (morel
bait!), which suggests that the species, while incontestably
diminished and under siege, is in no immediate danger of extinction.
Meanwhile, efforts to find resistant individuals and hybrids have met
with some promising succeses. One can do no more than wish that other
species were so lucky.

Land that we own in Geogia has been denuded of pine trees thanks to the
Pine Bore Beetle. *About 20 years ago there was a terrible drought in
Georgia. *It weakened the pine trees and the beetle got a good start
wrecking its havoc. *We still see dead pines in the area we now live.

Having a plateful of deadly infections close at hand, one hopes that
one can be forgiven for knowing virtually nothing at all about someone
else's plague half a continent away. Not that one lacks
sympathy.....far from it, with a plateful of deadly infections of
one's own.....but one can hardly keep track. In any case, Little's
thesis seems to be valid however much some folks might quibble about
details.

The Asian long horn beetle has devastated hardwood trees in several
towns in Massachusetts. *All the infected trees were on the tree-belt
lining streets in each town. *To stop the spread, each tree was cut
down, its stump removed, and all the wood burned. *It's deja vu all
over again; *sixty years after the elms, these hardwoods are now
disappearing.

Sounds much like the control plan advocated by the U.S. forest service
in the heyday of the chestnut blight.....might as well cut 'em all
down and get something for the bark and lumber before the blight kills
'em and makes 'em all utterly worthless.

Flowering dogwoods, however, seem to be able to get by inspite of the
anthracnose. *We have many on our property in both Massachusetts and
Georgia, and although we have lost one or two in both properties, they
seem to propagate enough to overcome any losses. *The woods hereabout
are literally filled with healthy trees. *Their blooms enchant in the
springtime, while their burgandy colored leaves brighten the most
dismal of autumn weather.

Interesting. Frankly, Little's suggestion that the flowering dogwood
is all but extinct in its native range raised an eyebrow here too, but
I was willing to bow to his presumed greater experience, expertise and
authority, despite having seen a good few trees in bloom in the
southern Appalachians myself within the last decade. I guess the take
home lesson is that a boy needs to be careful about what he accepts on
faith. Nevertheless, the underlying thesis of the book is still
indisputably sound.

Joanne and I took great, if perverted, joy in making torches out of old
broom sticks and strips of rag and ridding trees of tent caterpillars. *
Although the apple, maple and birch trees would survive these pests,
their "tents" were unsightly. *Gypsy mouths have also invaded our
trees, but we found that if we sprayed them with a solution of just a
little dish washing fluid mixed with water in a spray bottle would kill
them without any colateral damage to the trees.

During the short delusional interval when I convinced myself that I
could survive as a chemistry major in college some 25 or so years ago,
I learned that there were, at that time, roughly two million synthetic
organic compounds floating about here and there. Probably a few
trillion by now. A huge segment of the petrochemical industry is
devoted to developing even more, all in the apparently vain hope of
finding something or other that will kill insect pests reliably for
more than a generation or two.....and maybe not kill too much of
everything else around them. In all fairness, I've got to say that
based purely on my own experience they've done a fine job on wasps/
hornets/bees.....hymenoptera in general; they've got some **** out
there that kills them NOW! Everything else seems to be pretty much an
unrelieved and dismal failure. A solution of dish soap in water beats
the hell out of anything else I've tried.....and the bugs have not yet
found an adaptive trick to deal with it. Becky had an infestation of
some sort of caterpillars on a spruce seedling a few years ago. We
tried a variety of commercial pesticides, all of which the worms
appeared to relish. A single squirt of the dish soap from a spray
bottle had them all writhing instantly and stone cold ****in' dead
within a couple of minutes. Just a guess, but I believe what killed
them was not the chemistry of the soap interacting negatively wth
their own body chemistry, but rather the purely mechanical effect of
soapy goo clogging breathing spiracles or something like that. The
nasty little brutes might as well try to evolve an effective means of
dealing with a 12 ounce ball peen hammer.

As you say, "It's a hell of a time to be moving to a tree farm!"

Good luck, and try not to freeze your ass off this winter.

Thanks. I shouldn't have to try real hard. I mean, anybody who
freezes his ass off on an 80 acre woodlot has sort of GOT TO deserve
it.....rght?

Wolfgang

On Nov 5, 12:24*pm, DaveS wrote:

Congratulations.

Thanks.

It all sounds like this move will put you in a place
closer to where you want to be.

I'm trying to visualize something that would put me closer
yet.....nothing has come to mind.

It's a possibility that I believe many
of our ilk (Sportsmen, enviros, agropups etc) entertain but don't get
to experience. *Not a day goes by that I don't mentally extend my own
farm groupie stays to full time, in my mind at least.

Good luck

Reification. According to Wikipedia; "fallacy of treating an
abstraction as if it were a real thing." A good enough definition.
I've also heard it referred to as the process by which something is
perceived as being real simply by virtue of the fact that it has been
given a name. And so it is with "luck", good or bad. People often
describe themselves, or others, as having one or the other in greater
or lesser amounts. In fact, luck isn't anything at all. There is no
predictive value legitimately associated with the term. It is, at
best, a shorthand description of what has happened to someone thus
far.

All that said, the shorthand description of my life thus far is "good
luck".....and I hope that you will soon be able to say the same.

Wolfgang

On Nov 5, 8:09*pm, Giles wrote:
Wolfgang

What he said. And Buena Suerte.
Dave

On Nov 5, 3:14*pm, Frank Reid © 2010 wrote:

Wolfy talks a good story trees and this nature crap, but I know that
there is some INCREDIBLE fishing about a 2 miles away from where he is
currently living.

Things ebb and flow, they come and they go. First there were
trees.....and fish. Then there were cows.....and no trees....or fish.
Now.....well, there are still cows, though fewer every year, and there
are once again trees.....and fish.....in ever increasing numbers.
Correlation? Oh yeah, unmistakable. Causation? I believe the
technical term is, "No, duh!"

Hmm, the drifter ends up in the driftless area.

Aw shucks, 'tweren't nuthin'.....a boy's just gotta be quicker than a
glacier.

Congrats Wolf.

Thanks.

Now you just have to get Becky a spot up there.

She's been looking. Not just here, but in many places outside the
urban jungle. It's just a matter of time; in her line of work she
can, eventually, find a good spot virtually anywhere she wants to go.

Wolfgang