Nice to travel, nice to be home, MN Nice?

We're back home in the South end of the North Country. The snow showers stopped a little South of Cloquet but the clouds continued to precede us and are still hanging around. A few of the wolf photos from the International Wolf Center turned out well. Many others show a wild animal's desire to avoid eye contact. The ravens look like ravens feeding on roadkill or the equivalent. We're still frustrated at an ongoing inability to readily identify ravens compared to crows. It's one that we'll just have to keep working on / at?

ravens feeding on carcass

Photo by J. Harrington

Something we've neglected to report on before this are the swans we saw on our drive North Saturday. One pair South of Cloquet, flying in the low clouds, crossing the road, and two pair flying plus a flock on the water North of Cloquet. We don't remember ever seeing swans in the vicinity of Duluth / Cloquet in all the times we've visited. In addition, other wildlife observations include one whitetail beside the road near Embarrass, one or two bald eagles, multiple ravens and / or crows [see preceding paragraph] and several flocks of small birds.

wolf stalking raven

Photo by J. Harrington

As is often the case, it was nice to travel and visit places rarely seen or never seen before and also nice to return home to familiar surroundings. We remember reading that the typical home range for a whitetail deer is about one mile square. We noted maps of the ranges of several wolf packs (see p. 3) during our visit to the International Wolf Center. Do we humans have a home range and if so, what is it? Would it be established by our average commute? Our shopping radius (not counting mail order)? How much of a sense of community among adults depends on having children in the same schools? Christopher Alexander, in A Pattern Language writes about a Community of 7,000 and about Community Networks. We're overdue for a relook at his descriptions of Community and at thinking about the relationships among community, rural life and wilderness.

Raven’s Last Dream

Red Hawk

Raven was in a deep sleep,
dreaming the world. He saw things
and they happened, He dreamed things
and they came to life. He hardly knew 
where to begin or what to do 

once the world was. At last He understood 
Fodder’s dilemma. It troubled Him, 
made Him restless, disturbed His sleep. 
Then the terrible thing happened:
He had a thought.
 
Everything dream? He wonder.
Then the worst thing happened:
He had another thought, one thought
following the other.
Who dreaming Raven? He wonder and
 
this woke Him up.
He looked up, He looked down, He
looked all around.
Don’t know, He say and
He couldn’t get back to sleep.

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