Backyard Adventures: Squirrel

Yesterday was a sunny, relatively warm day here at the southern edge of Central Illinois.  I was inside for a while after lunch, working at my laptop.  My dog, Tanner, kept nudging me to get my attention.  When I looked at him, he would give me the hairy eyeball then turn his head to look towards the sunlight streaming in the kitchen door.  I could read his mind as clearly as if there was a cartoon thought bubble hanging over his head:  'Person-Who-Feeds-Me, why oh why are we not outside basking in the sun?'


I couldn't think of a valid answer - at least, not one that wouldn't sound ridiculous to a dog.  As Tanner danced around me wagging his tail, I grabbed a book, my sunglasses and a glass of water.  Out we went.


I pulled a cushion onto one of the deck chairs and sat.  Tanner took up his usual position, smack in the middle of a sunny spot on the warm painted boards of the deck.  First I sat with my head back, enjoying the feel of the sun on my skin.  Then I opened the book and tried to read.


It wasn't long before I was distracted by the small adventures playing out around me, and I had to set the book down.  A gray squirrel was traversing the length of the block on his raceway of tree branches.  He moved swiftly, with sure feet, up the thick tree trunks and out onto the ends of the thinnest limbs.  He executed death-defying leaps from one tree to the next, dangling precariously as the limbs - barely strong enough to support his weight - swung and dipped.  On one of his more daredevil landings he flipped upside down at the very tip of a narrow branch.  I thought he was a goner, but he pulled himself upright and kept going.


The squirrel reached the corner of the seven-foot wooden fence that surrounds our back yard on two sides.  He was poised for a quick run up the length of it until he saw Tanner and me on the deck.  He froze in place, nose up, tail at half mast, and watched to see what we would do.  I raised a hand to shade my eyes and watched him back.  Tanner, busy sniffing at a stick lying next to his front paw, was oblivious.  Three minutes ticked by.  The squirrel stayed where he was.  


Two more minutes passed.  Other than a twitch of his tail, the squirrel had not yet moved.  Neither had I.  Sitting so still, I became aware of the world in motion all around us.  Birds flitted about, each twittering in his own distinctive language:  robins and sparrows, mourning doves and house finches, cardinals and crows.  A curious bumblebee did a brief fly-by around my elbow and moved along.  My neighbor across the alley started up his old pickup truck and rumbled off in the direction of Old Route 40.  His boxer puppy, annoyed at being left behind, gave a series of pathetic yelps.  A woodpecker hammered away in another neighbor's tree somewhere off to the south.  Still the squirrel perched on the fence, watching me watch him.


At last he sprang up suddenly, as though he'd been poked.  He came towards me across the top of the fence, but only went about three feet before he paused, reconsidered, and backtracked to the tree from which he'd climbed onto the fence in the first place.  He trundled off, a furry little package of determination, and joined one of his cohorts in the heights of the massive oak tree in the yard next door, which is one of the biggest, oldest trees in town.


As soon as the squirrel was out of sight, my attention was captured by a female cardinal.  She alighted in the small tree at the corner of the deck, about four feet away from me.  Her body was the same brown shade as the branches on the tree, but her sunset-red beak and the dusky red feather on her pointed cap and tail feathers gave her away.  Within a few seconds her mate landed on the fence close by.  He was smaller, and flamboyantly scarlet.  The two birds held a quick conference before flying off in the direction of the Victorian house across the street.


Tanner stretched, yawned, and trotted out to the corner of our yard.  The 40-foot tall remains of another of the biggest, oldest trees in town stands there, draped in ivy vines.  Tanner began a detailed investigation of the layer of detritus at the base of the tree.  Idly, I glanced over at him.  A quick movement in the background caught my eye.


It was my friend the gray squirrel.  He had returned from his junket in the neighboring tree and was making his way across the horizontal slat at the back of the fence.  When he got even with our old tree, his head and front paws popped up over the top of the fence. He was poised and ready to leap over into the tree until he he saw Tanner, who again was oblivious to his proximity.  The squirrel literally slumped down and shook his head.  I imagined how a cartoon thought bubble over his head would read:  'Dangit, would somebody get this blasted dog out of here so I can go on about my business?!'


I laughed.  Tanner looked over at me.  The squirrel took Tanner's distracted state as an opportunity to make his leap.  Five turkey vultures soared in a cartwheel pattern, riding the thermals high above the edge of the block.  The afternoon blazed on. 

Albert, or Ode To My Wheels

I've had the same travel companion since May of 1999.  He's handsome.  He's reliable. He's sturdy.  He's sporty.  He's always ready to go.  He's willing to take me into - and get me out of - any remote place.


I'm talking about my four wheel drive, soft top Jeep Wrangler.  It's a sandy gold color.  The top is black.  I ordered it from the dealer.  It was delivered to me straight from the factory.  My name was on the sticker that was affixed to the window.  There were eight miles on the odometer.


The vanity plates I ordered when the Jeep was new said BRKN ARW, after a line in a Grateful Dead song.  I was fairly certain its name was not Broken Arrow, but I had trouble coming up with a name that I liked.


Finally, after I'd had him four or five years already, I was driving to my job at a farmer's market in Flagstaff, Arizona.  It was a brilliantly sunny morning.  The sun was filtering softly through the Ponderosa pines along the roadside.  I was thinking that it was high time I named the Jeep.  I decided rather than trying to come up with one myself, as I'd been trying to do for so long, I'd simply ask the Jeep what its name was.  I resolved to ask the question, then go with the first name that popped into my head.  


The name that came to me was Albert.  I was incredulous - really?  Albert?!  Albert.  All day at work I thought about the name.  It grew on me.  It was a good, solid name.  Somehow it fit.  So Albert he is.


Albert's fabric top vibrates ceaselessly.  The plastic windows in the rear slap the roll bars.  Given the right amount of wind, the volume in the Jeep can be like being enclosed in a metal drum with nine thousand geese, all of whom are honking and flapping their wings at once.  There have been days that I have come off the road feeling physically battered by the noise and motion.  If the weather is warm enough to have the front windows open, yet not warm enough to put the top down, I can forget about listening to music or speaking to my passengers in a normal conversational tone.

Albert is probably one of the least aerodynamically built vehicles ever put on the road.  He's fairly lightweight, even when packed to the roll bars with camping gear and pets.  Strong gusts cause him to rock and sway.  In anything but a tail wind, I have to fight to keep him going in a straight line.  If my attention wanders, the wind generated by a passing semi can shove him towards the shoulder.

Albert's four-cylinder engine makes him less a powerful beast and more The Little Jeep That Could.  Inclines of any type intimidate him.  The higher the elevation, the steeper the grade, the slower he climbs.  Plenty of times we've groaned up mountain passes behind semi trucks that were hauling heavy equipment, and the semis have outpaced us.  I'm accustomed to putting on my flashers and settling in for the grind to the top, but in the back of my mind sometimes I wish I could get him a little more horsepower.


Also on my retro-active wish list is air conditioning.  When I ordered Albert my thought process was that I'd have the top down all the time in warm weather.  So, my reasoning went, why would I need a/c?  I didn't take into account what I would do when it rains during the sultry, humid weather typical to Midwestern summers.  When it's warmer than 70 degrees out, Albert's fan blows hot moist air.  It's like riding in the mouth of a hyperventilating ogre, only perhaps a bit less smelly.


These may seem like drawbacks, but I consider them to be Albert's more endearing quirks. Like the dimple in his hood, they feed into his personality.  I wouldn't trade him for a hundred faster, flashier vehicles.


Plus, any number of other factors balance out the quirks.  He's paid for.  He's nearing the 200,000 mile mark on his odometer, yet he starts every time and runs as well as he ever did.  I've had to replace a few parts here and there, but annual repair and maintenance costs have never come close to what I paid in car payments every year.  The smaller engine size forces me to drive more slowly, which has gone a long way towards curbing my innate impatience - thereby preventing me from getting a bunch of speeding tickets. 


I keep thinking that one of these days I'll spiff him up a little bit.  Throw on a lift kit and some bigger tires.  Replace the cloth seats with neoprene.  Remove the floorboard carpets and see about installing some of that spray-in bedliner I've seen used in pickup truck beds, so I can hose him down inside and out and get on with my day.  Maybe someday, when I live in the desert again, I'll do that.


In the meantime, Albert and I will keep chugging along.

Albert on the Mendocino Coast, Northern California.  October 2006.

Pounds Hollow

My brother Rob and I were older than our friends' daughter JoAnn by two or three years.  JoAnn didn't have her own two-wheeler bicycle yet.


Our families were on a weekend camping trip together to Pounds Hollow Recreation Area.  Pounds Hollow is in the Shawnee National Forest, at the southeastern-most edge of Illinois.  Our campers were parked in adjacent sites, about two thirds of the way down a big hill - at least, in looked like a big hill to my ten-year-old eyes.


The weather was hot and sticky, as it tends to be in Southern Illinois in the summer.  The campground was primitive, meaning that there were restrooms and fresh drinking water, but no shower facilities or electrical hookups at the camp sites.  It didn't matter to us kids.  We had been amusing ourselves by swimming in the lake and tramping through the woods with our dads.  Now the dads had gone off somewhere and we were at the campsite with our moms, looking for a new form of entertainment.


I don't remember who came up with the idea first.  It was probably Rob.  He was the idea man, and more daring than I was.  Regardless, we decided it would be fun to push our bikes to the top of the hill and ride down.  Rob and I both had the standard kid-bikes of the time.  They were Easy Rider style, sporting high handle bars and banana seats.  Rob's was blue, and had a white seat.  I don't remember what color mine was, probably some traditionally girl-related color like pink.  What I do remember are the sparkly plastic streamers that dangled from the rubber grip of each handle bar.  They waved about in the wind and tickled my arms when I rode.


It was the biggest rush ever, flying down the hill one after the other on the narrow asphalt road.  The air lifted the hair off the back of my neck and felt almost cool.  The mid-afternoon sun slanted through the trees; we flashed from shadow into sunlight and back so rapidly it all became a green-gold blur.  The piney smell of camp fire smoke filled my nostrils.  I grinned and whooped from sheer joy.  Then the first bug hit the back of my throat and I learned to grin with my mouth shut.


JoAnn saw what we were doing and asked for a ride.  She didn't fit with me on my bike, so Rob and I took turns going down the hill carrying her in front of us on the seat of his bike. The difference in size between his bike and mine was just enough that I could reach the pedals, but steering was tricky.  Which made going down the hill even more of a thrill.


At one point my mom came out of the camper, saw what we were doing, and told us we couldn't give JoAnn any more rides down the hill.  The three of us begged for one more ride.  She relented, with a warning that we should be careful.  Of course we'd be careful!


That last time, I was on my bike.  Rob and JoAnn were in front of me, on his bike.  We shoved off from the top of the hill and were on our way down when a car came up behind us.  The driver saw us and slowed.  I tried to move over so he could pass.  As he came up next to me, I maneuvered closer to the right side of the road.  My front tire got into the loose, pea-sized gravel of the shoulder.  I could feel the front of the bike wobble.  I tried to correct it, to get back onto the pavement, but it was too late.


The car was already beyond us when I finally lost control and wiped out.  I'm pretty sure I blacked out for a few seconds.  Next thing I knew I was sitting in the gravel at the side of the road, bike forgotten, screaming as loud as my lungs would allow.  Gravel was embedded in my arms and legs and face.  The sight of blood streaming from myriad cuts and scrapes on my body, combined with the the shock of the fall, sent me over the edge.  Rob and JoAnn, terrified, had already run off to find our moms.  Our moms - and every other grown-up within hearing distance - had already heard me screaming and were on their way over to help.


When we got to the camper, Mom grabbed some towels and water and started cleaning me up.  She alternated between scolding ('You're lucky JoAnn wasn't on that bike with you', 'You could have been hurt much worse than this'), and trying to calm me down.  By the time she had gotten most of the rocks picked out of my skin and slathered Rawleigh's salve over me I was still in pain, but the hysteria level had subsided to a few random tears and a bad case of the hiccups.


For the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening, I lay on the cushioned seat at the front of the camper, keeping as still as possible.  When I moved I sweated, and the sweat made the cuts sting worse.  I dozed a little.  Once in a while, the straw-colored curtains swayed inward from a stray breeze.  I could hear the other kids playing, the parents talking as they prepared supper.


I rebounded pretty quickly, as kids do.  The web of long, paper-thin scars on my arms and legs faded away.  I was in my early thirties when I became aware that they were no longer visible.  I do still bear one small token from that accident, however, a pucker of scar tissue on my upper lip.  When I look back at the incident now I think about all the ways it could have turned out very differently.  Still.  If that's the worst I've had, I'd say I'm doing all right.

Just Like Groundhog Day

"Somebody asked me today, 'Phil, if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you like to be?'  And I said to him, 'Probably right here - Elko, Nevada, our nation's high at 79 today.'"  - Opening lines of 'Groundhog Day'

In the classic Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a sarcastic, egotistical weather man who gets stuck in Punxsutawny, Pennsylvania reliving February 2nd - Groundhog Day - over and over.


Today, the sky is the same dull shade of pigeon-gray it has been every day, all winter, with very few exceptions.  Days like this, I empathize with Phil.  Late in the movie, when he's doing his (I'm guessing, here) four hundredth broadcast in a row at the site where Phil the Groundhog is pulled from his hutch to determine the exact end of winter, he says, "You want a prediction, you're asking the wrong Phil.  I'll give you a winter prediction.  It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be gray, and it's going to last you the rest of your life."


Whether you call it cabin fever, 'house-itosis' (as my Grandma did), or Seasonal Affective Disorder, this weather wears on me.  I am alternately grumpy, restless, and lethargic, when not outright depressed.  I'm short-tempered with my friends.  I sabotage my long-term relationships; the fact that nearly all of them have ended in the winter is no coincidence.  This is exacerbated, in the midst of my second winter back in Illinois, by the knowledge that I don't suffer to this extent when I live in sunnier climates.


Just after New Year's this year I was driving downstate after visiting my best friend in Chicago.  I'd been fighting off the worst of the annual grouchiness and depression for a couple weeks.  I was also working really hard to keep my dark, evil side from ruining a relationship I'm getting a second chance at after twenty years.  


In one of those epiphany moments that often come to me while I'm driving, a realization struck:  These struggles I go through are unpleasant, but they're not necessarily a bad thing.  In the same way the trees get stripped bare of their leaves so that new growth can occur, I go through a phase in the winter whereby the illusions I'm able to maintain the rest of the year fall away.  This, in turn, forces me to come up with creative solutions in order to preserve my sanity.  It's through this process that I figured out how to mitigate the restlessness by taking short trips to sunny places when I can, learned ways to manage the depression without the use of pharmaceuticals, and fight off the lethargy with a combination of yoga, meditation, and regular walks about town with my dog.


When all else fails, I lay off the decaf and turn to regular coffee, in espresso form.  Caffeine makes me happy.


Still, to rephrase the quote above, If somebody were to ask me today, "Debbie, if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you like to be?"  I'd have to say to him, "Probably in Yuma, Arizona**, where it was 87 degrees today, and which boasts our nation's highest average sunny days per year, at around 328.5*."




* Number of days are extrapolated from the percentages listed here:  www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/online/ccd/pctposrank.txt  
** Cool facts about Yuma:  www.visityuma.com/history.html

Serendipitous Moment

In May of 2010 I was in Tillamook, Oregon for an overnight camping adventure along the Oregon Coast.  On the way back to my temporary home in Fossil, OR, I drove the Wilson River Highway through Tillamook State Forest.  I was in the mood to explore, and I'd seen a sign earlier for the Tillamook Forest Center, so I stopped to check it out.


The Tillamook Forest Center is a lovely new facility set in the midst of the state forest.  It is built with green and sustainable principles in mind.  The facility itself is wood and glass and rock and steel.  A wide lagoon across the front is fed by drainage from the roof gutters when it rains (they get over 100 inches of rain a year).  From the lagoon, the water is recycled into the building and used to flush toilets, cool the air, and supply the fire sprinklers.  Wood pellets, waste from nearby logging operations, are used to heat the building in the winter.  


A replica fire lookout tower, forty feet tall, stands at the edge of the parking lot.  Visitors can climb up into it for a bird's-eye view of the grounds and a glimpse into the daily life of a mid-twentieth century fire spotter.  Next to the tower is a monument made of stone and metal mesh, memorializing hotshots and forest fire fighters who have died in the line of duty.  Outside the back door is a deck with a cafe-type seating area.  From the deck, a wood and steel suspension bridge spans the Wilson River and leads to a maze of trails through the forest.


The Forest Center houses a series of interactive exhibits that bring to life the rich history of the Tillamook area, with an emphasis on the story of the Tillamook Burn.  The Tillamook Burn is the name given to a series of wildfires that ravaged the forests in the Tillamook area.  The first fire began in August of 1933, ignited by sparks from the friction of two logs being dragged over one another during a logging operation.  Abnormally dry weather conditions, coupled with record high temperatures and strong winds, fanned the flames.  More than 250,000 acres were destroyed before rains in early September brought a halt to the spread of the fire.  Additional large wildfires occurred in 1939, 1945, and 1951.  


In total over 360,000 acres were burned over that eighteen year period.  This included several tens of thousands of acres at the location of the original fire that burned more than once.  Although all the fires were started by careless logging practices, area residents  began to say they were under a 'six-year jinx'.


I listened to first-hand oral accounts recorded by firefighters, loggers and volunteers who fought the fires.  I stepped into a tree planter's tent to hear tales and view slides of the reforestation effort.  While the fires were detrimental to the environment and economy of the region, there was a bright side as well.  The state of Oregon bought the burned acreage from private landowners and created the state forest, opening the land for public enjoyment.  And many of the innovations made in firefighting techniques and tools are still in use today.  For instance, helicopters were used in a fire effort for the first time, dropping upwards of a billion Douglas fir seeds on steep slopes that were difficult to reach by foot.  In the early 1950's the first women, affectionately referred to as 'cloud girls', were employed as fire lookouts in the area of the Burn.  The lessons learned by the park service, fire fighters, loggers and environmentalists continue to have a lasting impact on logging, reforestation, and general forest stewardship.


Processing this information, I wandered outside onto the bridge.  Below me, the river was clear and shallow.  Aside from a man fishing downstream, few people were about.  A pale grey mist hovered over the treetops.  The pine forest on nearby hills and mountains was green and lush.  It was difficult to believe that the area had ever looked any other way, a true testament to the thousands of volunteers who planted more than 72 million seedlings by hand during the reforesting efforts that lasted from 1949 until 1972.  


When I went back inside, a group of school children had arrived.  Their chaperones herded them into a small theater to see a film about the fire.  As the commotion from the children died down, a large batch of seniors came in.  I eavesdropped on a couple of the men who were talking to the girl behind the gift shop counter.  One of them said they had come down from Vancouver, WA and were stopping at various places of interest along the coast.  Given how many of them there were, I imagined they were part of a tour group traveling by charter bus.


I was unprepared, then when I returned to the parking lot.  I saw the first one, a classy deep blue number along the lines of a vintage Mercedes or Rolls Royce, when I started to back out of my parking spot.  Quickly I pulled back into the space, fumbling for my camera.  That's when I saw the rest of them:  thirty or forty classic Studebakers in every color and model, all in impeccable condition.  Delightful.  I surmised that the group of seniors I'd seen inside were actually members of a car club that took their vehicles out on occasional road trips - and I reveled in the joy of encountering another unexpected boon during my travels.


To learn more about the Tillamook Forest Center, go here:  www.tillamookforestcenter.org