Bright But Cold

Fine day for walks, yard work, and bike rides.

The back yard faces east.

The back yard faces east.

The Spring Seems Slow

Bright sun has chased away the snow,
But still—the spring seems slow.

The prairie path is dry, no longer mud,
On silver maple, twigs with swollen bud.

Snowdrops bloom despite a lingering chill,
But across the world so many people ill.

No school for kids, no place for them to go,
The sun is bright, but, oh, the spring seems slow.

Rain Delay…

…or there would have been if anything was going on—but there wasn’t.

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The lady at the dog food store brought a small order out to my truck, which was parked outside her shop, dropped it in the bed, took my Clorox-wipe-wrapped credit card, and that was that—my only semi-social event of the day—and all done at arm’s length with few words.

Happy Equinox, by the way.

Today’s Prescription…

…Walk in the rain until wet. Repeat as necessary.

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And the giant cookies (made of the former ash tree) have been baked into the existing tree-remains back fence, and the whole mess cleaned up. The back yard view is now much improved, and will only get better.

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Counting the rings, the former towering ash tree appears to have been about 50 years old. And to think that a little green beetle could kill such a hard, hard, hardwood.

Out For a Drive

Moving at 70 mph we hoped to outrun the virus. First we stopped in Fox Point to exchange a few items with the inhabitants (all done in the driveway, with everyone keeping distance), and then on to Oconomowoc, where we did the same thing. In between, we stopped for a picnic (pb&j). And when we got home we found Chet up a tree—the dead ash just across the property line in neighbor’s back yard,

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Seeing as how our neighbor is not exactly the kind of neighbor you might hope to have, and suspecting that he would opt to leave the dead ash standing until it fell down, we told Chet we would pay a quarter of the cost, thus allowing him to give the neighbor a very favorable price. This stratagem worked, and now we can sit on the back patio and not look at an eyesore.

In Isolation

Sue talked to no one face-to-face. I talked with Chet, though at a distance, as he was taking down a tree in a neighbor’s yard. On the back of his business card is a list of his specialties: Arborist/Tree Surgeon, Teacher, Contra Dance Caller, Woodworker, Musician, and Raconteur. And, after talking to him, I’ve come to believe he is all of that and more. Fascinating person. We might work together on an arboretum curriculum for Starin Park.

Whitewater a ghost town…strange times.

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Sky Full of Cranes

The rattling bugle calls coming from every direction high above. Many small flocks. I watched one for about 15 minutes; they were high, wings outspread but not flapping, circling lazily, round and round.

These are not cranes.

These are not cranes.

Were they riding the thermal elevator trying to gain more altitude? Were they waiting for compatriots coming up behind? Were they in a holding pattern waiting for more favorable conditions? Were they thinking about terra firma and fields of corn stubble and, therefore starting to spiral down? Not sure. But I will say that I find their penetrating calls exhilarating and un-ignorable.

Snow Showers

Quick stop at the Farmer’s Market, which was open, and surprisingly busy, though with everyone keeping respectful distances. Eighteen pullet eggs and one substantial oven bird bird. Not to mention two bricks of local super sharp cheddar.

Chilly, with snow showers, as Pax and I went walking afterward.

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Then, to the grocery in Fort. Also busy, with careful shoppers. No sign of panic, though the frozen food cases and paper products shelves mostly empty. Otherwise not too depleted. We semi-stocked up, not over doing it. Pumpkin pie on the menu tonight—two pies actually, though one is going next door.

Although the Uni is shut down until late April, and many students have left, quite a few haven’t, and the downtown bars were bulging with green clad drinkers at 9:30 in the morning. Not much social distancing taking place there.

Warblers In The Oaks

Back yard loudly musical, while Pax and I converted a pile of front yard birch windfalls to ash.

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Though cool and windy, a fine day to putter outside. And for a few bike rides, including one with Pax to the prairie.

Considerable afternoon traffic as the University emptied out. Everything shut down until at least April 20. Not good for students or local business, but Pax and I won’t mind wandering the deserted campus.

Green Manure

The green manure cover crop planted last fall, and just recently freed of its burden of snow, is springing into action.

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And below some notes on the book Wildness.

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Wildness

Note and Quotes
The book is a series of essays addressing the ideas of wildness and wilderness. Much like the book Wilding, Wildness sees humans as part of the wild, and wilderness as capable of existing almost anywhere.

Gavin Van Horn, “Into The Wildness”
Whether its is a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a will be be, a unique expression of life.

Curt Meine, “The Edge of Anomaly”
If the Driftless Area is not “pristine, nor thoroughly humanized, neither is it like the rest of the agro-industrial American Midwest. It is not wholly engineered to serve as a mere medium for corn and soybeans bound for the global market. It has not been made efficient to the point of diminishing returns. The goat prairies, woodlands, bottomland forests, riparian wetlands, rivers, streams, and springs keep the landscape diversified. Smaller-scale diary and livestock operations, with actual grazing animals, remain relatively viable so that a large portion of the land is covered in permanent pasture. The corrugated topography does not lend itself to ever-expanding economies of scale. Even the big-box stores have hard time squeezing into the narrow valleys.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Listening To The Forest”
Jeff Grignon explained that the idea of wild, untamed land did not exist in their (Menominee Nation, of Wisconsin) world but came along with the surge of newcomers, who pressed up against the Menominee homelands, misunderstanding their nature. The Algonquin languages, to which Menominee belongs, contain the pronoun Pekuac, meaning “growing on its own,” which  indicates the freedom of that being to live where it will rather than the site of its landscape. He says that for him , “When you can feel the aliveness of everything around using all the senses, you are experiencing wilderness.”

Laura Alice Watt, “Losing Wildness For The Sake Of Wilderness”
Those who are fundamentalist about wilderness, demanding a purist definition of these landscapes, are driving humans and nature farther apart; what we need is a return to a more pragmatic vision of wilderness, one that recognizes that not all human actions diminish wildness, so as to make room for the relative wild once more.

Margot Higgins, “Inhabiting the Alaskan Wild”
“I like getting up and looking at what I get to look at every morning.”
—a comment by an elderly, long-time resident of the land that became the
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. 

Gavin Van Horn, “Healing the Urban Wild”
Quoting Gary Snyder:
“When an ecosystem is full functioning, al the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came our of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of Alll Beings is in no way regressive.”

And, speaking of Greencorps in Chicago:
Ecological restoration in the city is one attempt to ensure that all members of the assembly are present. 

Seth Magle, “Building the Civilized Wild”
Also speaking of Chicago:
And slowly we can make cities into places where we can conserve rare species, too. This is called reconciliation ecology, and it opens up possibilities for cities that are a far cry from lifeless wastelands.

John Hausdoerffer,  “The Akiing Ethic”
Akiing, then, is both land to which the people belong and land that requires the people.

The future of wildness lies in the discovery of the self-willed human and nonhuman communities that make up my “rice” and in the akiing, the land to which my people (whoever they might be)belong. I must, somehow, cultivate the Akiing Ethic.

Fog Over Snow

Not much snow left, but where it is, fog from a warm, damp wind blowing over the remnants in the lee of hedgerows.

Not much snow, but, instead, snowdrops.

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Can’t forget to mention that Will helped with yesterday’s soil block making, too; in fact he did all the heavy lifting.

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