It's sourdough, not sour dough

In our youth, before society became concerned about fine particulates, classic signs of Autumn were the crunch of leaves underfoot, piles of leaves on the lawn so we could jump into them, and the smell of burning leaves to turn leaf piles, sans children, into ashes. Alas, no more the latter. Now the classic smell of Autumn is the return of bread baking season filling the house with the aroma of fresh sourdough or artisan breads.

an end result

Photo by J. Harrington

When I grew up in New England, lots of folks who raked leaves also strongly believed in the attitude of "wear it out, use it up, make do, do it yourself." That's no doubt where we built a foundation for our dismay at the prospect of throwing out the discards every time we feed the sourdough starters. (We now have two starters, one from King Arthur flour a few years ago and the other we raised from scratch this Summer, following guidance that started with Michael Pollan.) Unless we notice a distinct difference in the flavor or structure of bread baked with one versus the other, we suspect both starters will eventually start cohabiting. For now, however, feeding two starters is creating lots of discards.

King Arthur starter

Photo by J. Harrington

The Better Half used to use most of our starter discards to make crepes, but the amount of discarded starter we're producing seems to have exceeded her appetite for those delicacies. We are now in the process of being overrun with a jug/jar filling with excess starter. Internet to the rescue. We found a recipe for cinnamon-apple flatbread that's supposed to work equally well with fed starter or starter discards. As this is being written, we're boiling down (reducing) apple cider to boiled apple cider and have plans to try the flatbread one of the upcoming cool, wet days in our forecast for next week. We'll also try a recipe using starter discards for soft pretzels. The weather won't dampen our spirits with the schedule we're planning.

home made starter

Photo by J. Harrington

As we were poking around some of the flour-filled corners of the internet, we did discover what looks to us like one of the better sets of instructions of how to bake with sourdough. That author, like yours truly, started with artisan bread and moved on to sourdough. I did try her float test with starter that was fed yesterday; it sank; and starter that had been fed several hours earlier today; it floated. Here comes the old cliche: "if we can bake good sourdough bread, anyone can." It's true! Also, it's fun and even most of our mistakes taste good, better than the paste we made in kindergarten from flour and water that we were often admonished not to eat.

                     Bread Soup: An Old Icelandic Recipe

By Bill Holm

Start with the square heavy loaf

steamed a whole day in a hot spring

until the coarse rye, sugar, yeast

grow dense as a black hole of bread.

Let it age and dry a little,

then soak the old loaf for a day

in warm water flavored

with raisins and lemon slices.

Boil it until it is thick as molasses.

Pour it in a flat white bowl.

Ladle a good dollop of whipped cream

to melt in its brown belly.

This soup is alive as any animal,

and the yeast and cream and rye

will sing inside you after eating

for a long time.

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Locally rooted #phenology

Yesterday, on the way to pick up our box of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares, we flushed a flock of northern [yellow-shafted] flickers from the roadside. We're guessing they were migrating, since that's when we see multiple flickers flicker through the neighborhood. Otherwise, it's usually one or two of the locals at a time at the feeder.

northern flicker in Winter

Photo by J. Harrington

This is the time of year root vegetables really start to come into their own. Our CSA box had some, and some sweet sixteen apples. The root vegetables arrived in our kitchen before the CSA's email newsletter arrived in our inbox. We thought we were familiar with what all the locally grown root veggies look like and we were wrong. It took some research, plus the application of the process of elimination, to determine that we had two very, VERY rutabagas in our possession. A subsequent email from the CSA staff, and the arrival of the newsletter confirmed our suspicions. Sometimes, a sufficient shift in the size of something can create confusion about its identity.

do these look like rutabagas?

Photo by J. Harrington

There's a photo. Would you recognize them? We may get better at this checking our local roots, since we're now members of a Winter shares CSA that will involve even more root stock. All part of our focus on living more sustainably and locally even it if does add to the amount of head-scratching in our lives.

Morning Antlers

Arthur Sze, 1950

Redwinged blackbirds in the cattail pond—
today I kicked and flipped a wing 
in the sand and saw it was a sheared 
off flicker’s. Yesterday’s rain has left 
   
snow on Tesuque Peak, and the river 
will widen then dwindle. We step 
into a house and notice antlers mounted 
on the wall behind us; a ten-day-old child 
   
looks, nurses, and sleeps; his mother 
smiles but says she cries then cries 
as emptiness brims up and over.  
And as actions are rooted in feelings, 

I see how picking spinach in a field 
blossoms the picker, how a thoughtless act 
shears a wing. As we walk out 
to the car, the daylight is brighter 
   
than we knew. We do not believe 
flames shoot out of a cauldron of days 
but, looking at the horizon, see
flames leap and crown from tree to tree.

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When will our poetry go with our flow?

Today is National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom. It comes right in the middle of Banned Books Week in the U.S. (We're sure you know that on our side of the pond, National Poetry Month comes in April.) The Academy of American Poets has assembled a list of 10 Deliciously Dangerous Poetry Books, including Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland and A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein. Those choices make sense, right? After all, Plato banned poets in his Republic, right?

fishing the Sunrise River, a St. Croix tributary

Photo by J. Harrington

We might almost think that Minnesota had banned all, or any, of its poets from writing about our major rivers, or their tributaries, that flow through and from this state. We've done some quick searches and were hard pressed to find much in the way of poems about the Red River, the Minnesota, Mississippi or St. Croix. Somewhere we have a copy of a few locally published poems about the St. Croix, and recently finished reading K.S. Lubinski's Things that Flow, which includes poems specific to almost any river like the Mississippi, but, all told, Minnesota (or other) poets writing about Minnesota rivers yield mighty shallow water, so to speak. [For now, let's hold aside Gordon Lightfoot's Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, even though Lake Superior is one of Minnesota's major waters.]

"paddlewheeler" on the St. Croix

Photo by J. Harrington

English poets, especially one in particular, have written not just poems but entire volumes about single rivers. Alice Oswald's A Sleepwalk On The Severn as well as another of her volumes, Dart, each provide a model worth emulating. The former, "written for the 2009 festival of the Severn, aims to record what happens when the moon rises over us -- its effect on water and its effect on voices." Dart "is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart.... into a sound-map of the river...."

To borrow briefly from my exposure to Aristotle's fundamentals of logic:

• Water Is Life.
• Rivers Are Water, therefore;
• Rivers are Life

If Minnesotans had more poems about our waters, especially our rivers, would we care more for and about them? How long will it be until it's possible to produce a volume of poetry about Minnesota's rivers? Finally, we'll be delighted rather than upset to be proven wrong and be flooded with names and links to poems about Minnesota's rivers. Fill the comments form with your suggestions, please.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
     flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln 
     went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy 
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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Mixed bag on an Autumn day

After our past few rainy days, it was actually a rewarding change to get back at the buckthorn removal project. We've actually reached a point where the difference in understory is noticeable. If we don't finish before snow and cold, and frozen ground, make progress too difficult, we'll have a good shot at finishing in the Spring, before planting season. We'll either try one bag of wildflower seeds on top of the snow and the other come Spring, or wait until Spring and use both. Flexibility is beneficial after years of benign neglect on controlling buckthorn. Eradication is unrealistic since there  remain reservoirs of the invasive outside, but near, our property lines and birds that eat buckthorn berries have no respect whatsoever for such lines. The brush pile that may yet get burned this season has its own replacement stockpiles, so any critters that may have come to rely on it, such as runny babbit, won't be homeless this Winter. Meanwhile, we'll read through Prairie Restoration's reports on seasonal buckthorn management and see if we can pick up any helpful hints.

buckthorn disposal

Photo by J. Harrington

AGATE magazine has an encouraging, all things considered, article on Adaptation as Acceptance: Toward a New Normal in the Northwoods. Some day soon, or more likely over the Winter, we'll take a careful look at some of the adaptation tools [Tools for Embracing Change] listed at the article's end. If we read it correctly, part of the adaptation theme is about replacing conifers with deciduous trees. We wonder how that will fit with the growing concern about the effects of earth worms in the North Woods and what all of these watershed land use changes may have on the water quality in northern Minnesota. We all know that what happens on the land (and in the air) affects what's in the water.

replacement brush pile (habitat)

Photo by J. Harrington

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is beginning to identify and map geographic areas of environmental justice [EJ] concern. We look forward to the day when MnPCA further breaks down their topical and geographic silos and lets viewers access EJ layers together with the Impaired Waters Viewer and whatever is relevant from the superfund and air quality related data. And then, if Commerce or the PUC provided layers on pipelines and oil train routes, we might actually "get the picture." Progress seems to come in such halting steps.

                     Cheer

By Stanley Plumly

Like the waxwings in the juniper,

a dozen at a time, divided, paired,

passing the berries back and forth, and by

nightfall, wobbling, piping, wounded with joy.

Or a party of redwings grazing what

falls—blossom and seed, nutmeat and fruit—

made light in the head and cut by the light,

swept from the ground, carried downwind, taken....

It's called wing-rowing, the wing-burdened arms

unbending, yielding, striking a balance,

walking the white invisible line drawn

just ahead in the air, first sign the slur,

the liquid notes too liquid, the heart in

the mouth melodious, too close, which starts

the chanting, the crooning, the long lyric

silences, the song of our undoing.

It's called side-step, head-forward, raised-crown, flap-

and-glide-flight aggression, though courtship is

the object, affection the compulsion,

love the overspill—the body nodding,

still standing, ready to fly straight out of

itself—or its bill-tilt, wing-flash, topple-

over; wing-droop, bowing, tail-flick and drift;

back-ruffle, wingspread, quiver and soar.

Someone is troubled, someone is trying,

in earnest, to explain; to speak without

swallowing the tongue; to find the perfect

word among so few or the too many—

to sing like the thrush from the deepest part

of the understory, territorial,

carnal, thorn-at-the-throat, or flutelike

in order to make one sobering sound.

Sound of the breath blown over the bottle,

sound of the reveler home at dawn, light of

the sun a warbler yellow, the sun in

song-flight, lopsided-pose. Be of good-cheer,

my father says, lifting his glass to greet

a morning in which he's awake to be

with the birds: or up all night in the sleep

of the world, alive again, singing.

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Alight at the end of the tunnel #phenology

One of the signs of seasonal change at our house is that there are more and more spiders to watch, catch and release or otherwise harass with integrated pest management. At the moment, we have at least one funnel weaver spider ensconced in a sidelight of the front door. When next we feel ambitious enough to sweep fallen leaves and other autumnal clutter from the front porch, steps and ramp, we'll probably sweep the webs from the entrance area at the same time.

sidelight tunnel spider and web rear view

Photo by J. Harrington

The peak of the mosquito, deer and black fly season is past for this year, so the utilitarian function of basically harmless spiders has diminished. Their entertainment value, however, is sometimes enhanced if they locate their webs, or themselves, so they readily can be watched and/or photographed. We'd be even more partial to keeping most spiders around if they were tick predators. As far as we know, that's not the case. More's the pity.

sidelight tunnel spider and web front view

Photo by J. Harrington

Once, some years ago, we we sitting in a waterfowl blind on an island in a lake in western Minnesota, probably in early October, when we saw a magical flight of spiders. Hundreds (thousands?) of teeny, tiny spiders had let out strands of silk and were sailing on the breeze, with the spiders themselves acting like tails on their silk-strand kites. Several kept losing lift and ended up getting draped over the geese decoys floating in front of us. It's the only time we've seen anything like that. It would've been worth the trip even if we hadn't seen any geese.

The folks at iNaturalist are hosting a citizen science effort to help clarify the known distribution of spiders in Minnesota. To help with identification of spiders, try Minnesota Spiders. There are several ways to relocate spiders from indoors to outdoors, without killing the arachnid. We're preferential toward the paper and cup method, but now that we think about it, we want to refresh our identification keys on brown recluse spiders. That's one we might be inclined to just smush with a slipper and be done with it, if we ever came across one. Mostly though, we try to take a "live and let live" approach with a catch and release element. After all, we've grown quite fond of one of the country's most famous barn spiders, Charlotte and her web. Plus, there's this

SPIDER

A spider lives inside my head

Who weaves a strange and wondrous web

Of silken threads and silver strings

To catch all sorts of flying things,

Like crumbs of thoughts and bits of smiles

And specks of dried-up tears

And dust of dreams that catch and cling

For years and years and years…

-Shel Silverstein      Everything On It

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Improve Minnesota's Water Quality: take politics out of pollution prevention

One aspect of Governor Dayton's efforts to improve Minnesota's water quality 25% by 2025 that might prove to be a very sensitive issue is the status of the current performance of some of the agencies within his administration meeting their responsibilities to protect and improve Minnesota's water resources. We are aware of at least three outstanding issues related to agency performance that raise concerns:

• The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is still under review by the United States Environmental Protection Agency for "failing to administer the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) program in accordance with the Clean Water Act (CWA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ( EPA’s ) regulations in connection with mining projects, including discharge from mine pits, mine waste rock piles and mine tailings waste facilities." The petition that triggered the review has been pending since July 2015.


• The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has recently been found, by a Minnesota judge, to be in violation of the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act and the "public trust doctrine" in regard to management of groundwater appropriation permits affecting White Bear Lake.


• That same Department of Natural Resources currently has under consideration two dam safety permits for the proposed PolyMet NorthMet mine, at least one of which requires that "The Permittee shall perpetually maintain the tailings basin and all of its components to ensure the integrity of all structures. Prior to the ultimate termination of the P ermittee ’s operation of the dam , the Commissioner may impose such requirements as may be necessary to ensure that the Permittee will remain financially responsible for carrying out the activities required for perpetual maintenance, and that adequate funding for perpetual maintenance continues to exist."

St. Louis River at Jay Cooke State Park, what would a tailings dam failure look like if it reached here?

Photo by J. Harrington

According to the Harvard Business Review, "The art of endurance is increasingly rare. Over the last 50 years, the average lifespan of S&P 500 companies has shrunk from around 60 years to closer to 18 years. For each company that has lasted more than a century, there are countless more that have failed. Recall the glory days of Polaroid, Kodak, and the F. W. Woolworth Company – companies that were once the best in their field but failed to untangle themselves from deeply embedded routines, and fatally flawed resource allocation processes."

Does the word "perpetual" appear in the article? Not that we noticed. We doubt there is, or ever will be, an entity such as a corporation with a "perpetual" life. Without such an entity, who would ultimately be responsible for cleaning up any mess created by an eventual tailings dam failure [dams are no more perpetual than corporations]? Minnesota tax payers? Might issuance of a dam permit requiring perpetual care then constitute another violation of the public trust doctrine and the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act?

St. Louis River at Duluth Harbor, could a tailings dam failure affect this far downstream?

Photo by J. Harrington

Should the solution be to undermine environmental protections to enable a project to proceed, as has been past practice due, perhaps, to political pressure? See the petition to withdraw NPDES authority, above, and the check the games the legislature and the Pollution Control Agency are currently playing with the standards to protect Minnesota's wild rice resources. If MPCA hasn't had staffing to reissue mining permits, where will they get resources to deal with a water quality standard as complex as that proposed for wild rice?

Is there any part of Minnesota's K - 12 core curriculum that emphasizes that we all depend on the natural environment? That we are all part of that environment? The 25 by 25 Tool Kits mention education from watershed associations. WHAT ABOUT HAVING EDUCATION ON ENVIRONMENTAL RIGHTS PROVIDED IN OUR SCHOOLS BY OUR SCHOOL DISTRICTS?

                     Perpetuum Mobile

By Marin Sorescu
Translated by Michael Hamburger

Between people’s

ideals

and their realization

there is always

a greater drop

than in the highest

of waterfalls.

This potential gradient

can be exploited

rationally,

if we build a sort of

power station above it.

The energy it supplies,

even if we use it only

to light our cigarettes,

is something

anyway;

for while one is smoking

one can very seriously

think up

ideals even crazier.

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Out of phase, out of season #phenology

Yesterday we tied the 90℉ local record high temperature for September 23. Today is likely to meet or exceed the record high temp for the day. While enjoying cups of cappuccino at Coffee Talk, the Better Half and I were inundated with dry, falling leaves as we sat and sipped on the back patio. The scenic drive to and from gave us an opportunity to check on the status of local crops and the leaf colors.

Winterberries in fruit

Photo by J. Harrington

Except for those that have browned from lack of moisture and heat stress, there's some, but not really much, leaf color showing. Soy beans are maturing but not there yet. Most of the corn is mostly mature. In fact, today we saw our first of the year harvested cornfield. We also saw clusters of intensely purple asters along several roadsides plus a few pale lavender hosta flowers by Coffee Talk's patio, and more asters, shocking pink(?) in front. That's about it for local wildflowers. Local winterberries are already in fruit.

out-of-season lilac bloom

Photo by J. Harrington

Now, all of the preceding seems to generally fit with the seasonal patterns we're familiar with, except of the heat and humidity, but, the Better Half alerted us to something that seems highly unseasonal. We've always associated lilac blooms with mid-May and sleepy grammar school classrooms, until today. We have, in front of the house, a lilac that's just come into bloom. We're not going to overreact and cut down a devil-possessed plant or anything like that, but we do want to note that the list of unusual to weird things keeps getting longer the more we experience climate change - global warming. We about ready to watch for a whole flock of black swans fly overhead.

                     Pass It On, III

By Rachel Hadas

Lilacs look neon in fading light.

Death makes life shine:

a tiredness, a flickering between

ages, which is each age;

a piling up to tottering

and falling back to sand.

So much for cycle. The front door lock

sticks each fall when we’re first back.

We are advised to oil it.

Olive oil in the keyhole:

again the old key turns.

Once again to meander

along the edge of water,

whether tideless sea or tidal river,

pushing the stroller, dreaming

oil in the lock; the key

dipped in lubricity

the boychild’s shining skin

me tired to the bone

Already summer’s over.

Goodbye, lilacs. Your

neon is past; you’ll bloom again

next spring. Past an age

each season feels like an end of summer

but still the tale’s to tell

over and over for those

lolling and snoozing in the stroller,

preparing to come after.

Tall house standing on its high green hill—

children, do you remember?

Lawns slant down to a stream.

Under a striped tent

a buffet’s spread in the sun.

Ideas of the eternal,

once molten, harden; cool.

Oil, oil in the lock.

The old key turns.

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Murmuring and buzzing signals of the season #phenology

Last night, despite the heat, we ate on the outdoor deck at the Watershed Cafe. There was an occasional breeze and the constant sound of flowing brooks to cool us. Bees and hornets, although not many, kept trying to taste our ketchup drips and the bright red ketchup bottle. They failed to find any satisfying sweetness but kept looking for some. This morning, about mid-morning, we drove past a couple of handfuls of duck hunters pulling out of the Sunrise River marshes and loading their canoes and duck boats back into their pickups. (The only time we ever unintentionally sank a boat was our canoe during a duck hunt in the South River marshes in Marshfield Massachusetts many, many years ago, but that's a posting for another day.)

bee on Autumn asters

Photo by J. Harrington

Along our driveway, bees continue to visit asters. We wonder if Monday's return to seasonal temperatures will reduce the number of visitors. Hornets are again swarming to a corner of our deck, the same one they head for every year, looking to find a sheltered, overwintering nook. When the cool weather sets in, we'll again see if we can disabuse them of the desirability of their chosen location for a Winter cabin.

male red-winged blackbird

Photo by J. Harrington

The copse of trees South of our house is currently full of red-winged blackbirds chittering and chattering. We suspect the combination of pre-migration season urges combined with the sudden appearance of unusual numbers of humans in local marshes triggered flocking and relocation movements to or trees. The Spring arrival of red-wings is seriously joyous. Autumn's departure is seldom noted, unless we see a murmuration.

                     [Murmurs from the earth of this land]

By Muriel Rukeyser

Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters,

       from the bowl of darkness. Down watercourses of our

       dragon childhood, where we ran barefoot.

We stand as growing women and men. Murmurs come down

        where water has not run for sixty years.

Murmurs from the tulip tree and the catalpa, from the ax of

        the stars, from the house on fire, ringing of glass; from

        the abandoned iron-black mill.

Stars with voices crying like mountain lions over forgotten

        colors.

Blue directions and a horizon, milky around the cities where the

        murmurs are deep enough to penetrate deep rock.

Trapping the lightning-bird, trapping the red central roots.

You know the murmurs. They come from your own throat.

You are the bridges to the city and the blazing food-plant green;

The sun of plants speaks in your voice, and the infinite shells of

        accretions

A beach of dream before the smoking mirror.

You are close to that surf, and the leaves heated by noon, and

        the star-ax, the miner’s glitter walls. The crests of the sea

Are the same strength you wake with, the darkness is the eyes

        of children forming for a blaze of sight and soon, soon,

Everywhere your own silence, who drink from the crater, the

        nebula, one another, the changes of the soul.

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Here's Autumn?

It's the Autumnal Equinox for those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere. Down South, below the Equator, they're welcoming Spring. At the moment, here in the North Country, the temperature is 84℉ and it "feels like 91" because the dew point is 73. This would be fine weather for a month or six weeks ago but not for the "first day of Autumn."

the "grand passage" can bring skies full of ducks

Photo by J. Harrington

Minnesota's duck season opens tomorrow. We've sat in duck blinds on openers in unseasonably warm weather that was much cooler than we're experiencing today. It's a very strange feeling, especially for those of us who've sometimes watched ice freeze around our decoys late in the season. We'll be very curious to see if tomorrow morning sounds as if a latest world war is being fought a little behind the house, or if today's duck hunters will wait for more traditional duck hunting conditions, when the skies in our neighborhood may look more like the photo above. If you're interested in discovering more of what we mean by traditional, see if you can lay your hands on a copy of any of the volumes of Gordon MacQuarrie's Stories of the Old Duck Hunters. Actually, see if you can find and read all of those volumes. The Superior WI area and the St. Croix Valley are the settings for most of those tales so you should feel pretty much at home.

Since tomorrow is supposed to have about the same weather conditions as today, we think we'll use it for some trout fishing scouting (unless the Better Half has other plans for us). It's been too many years since we've visited what once were very familiar haunts and hour or so's drive south of where we're currently living. This weather could make it be a good weekend to see if those haunts are still there and how much they may have changed. If this "global warming" weather pattern continues, we may even seriously consider exploring some of the waters open to Winter trout season later in the year or early next.

We sincerely hope that each and every one of you have a wonderful Autumn pursuing whatever local, outdoor activities are closest to your hearts and compatible with the weather, no matter how unseasonable, or seasonable, it may be.

                     Autumn

By Sydney Lea

Why not write something for those

who scratched out improbable livings here?

Someone has managed to sow

This broken field with stones, it appears,

So someone’s scratching it still,

Although that Japanese knotweed has edged

The tilth. Two wasps in the child

Attempt to catch sun on a rail of the bridge.

The old local doctor has passed

At almost a full decade past ninety.

He never seemed depressed.

Seventy now, if barely,

I consider the field again:

Someone will drag these rocks away

But they’ll be back. The air smells like rain,

Which is fine, the summer’s been much too dry.

Nothing is left of the barn

But some rusty steel straps in some nasty red osier.

The stone fence still looks sound,

But even there the knotweed steps over.

Hadn’t I pledged an elegy

To the old ones who worked here? You couldn’t claim

They thrived, exactly, but maybe

They likewise scented good wind full of rain,

Lifted eyes above this old orchard

To the cloud-darkened hills and found their support

Somehow, somewhere. No matter,

They kept going until they could go no more.

The trees’ puckered apples have gathered

A flock of birds, and as they alight,

They’re full of unseasonable chatter,

As if to say that all will be right.

The old ones I promised a poem

Must have said it too. It’ll be all right.

I never knew them. They’re gone.

I say it out loud, It’ll be all right.

—Caledonia County, Vermont

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Freedom Highway!

On a cool, September evening, not a hot August night, Rhiannon Giddens, not Neil Diamond, in The O'Shaughnessy, not a ragged tent, the Better Half [BH] and I attended a real, live, and very lively, performance of a contemporary version of Brother Sister Love's Traveling Salvation Show. [Henceforth in today's posting, comments and observations are strictly attributable to “Yr obt svt." The BH in no way should be presumed to be included in any use of an editorial "we."]

That editorial "we" hasn't been so moved, so engaged and seen such presence and looseness combined on stage since about 50 years ago when we were in the audience at Janis Joplin's concert on a hot August night in Harvard Stadium. [The first link in this posting takes you to an NPR review of Giddens' Freedom Highway album, including samplings of her singing.] If you haven't yet heard her and you enjoy folk, blues, country, or Americana, you really owe it to yourself to at least explore her singing. We still can't figure out where, in her relatively tall, thin body, she hides such an awesome voice, but it's there somewhere and we're glad and grateful.

Many of the concert's songs evoked youthful nostalgia and provoked rethinking of today's political-social-cultural environment. We haven't, quite yet, returned to days such as the one in mid-September 1963, when white supremacist members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed a Southern Baptist church, killing four young black girls. For now we have spared ourselves horrors such as those captured in Richard Farina's song Birmingham Sunday, which Giddens performed hauntingly last night. Almost as a counterpoint, she achingly sings a rendition of the song, She's Got You, first recorded and made popular by Patsy Cline back in the early 60's. We can't decide if we should be surprised that the range of Giddens' material almost matches her phenomenal vocal range.

We came of age, so to speak, during the 1960's civil rights and subsequent Viet Nam War protests. Songs like Freedom Highway (a 1965 civil rights protest song written by Roebuck Staples and the title track of The Staple Singers' album of the same name) and Birmingham Sunday are deeply embedded in the seed banks of our memories. After last night's performances, we find ourselves wondering if we've become so out of touch that we don't recognize any topical songs enjoyed by younger activists in today's struggles, or if such music is missing and its addition could contribute to more successful, progressive outcomes for contemporary efforts to create a saner, more just and caring world. Does the Occupy movement or 350.org have "theme" songs? Not yet, maybe not ever, according to this story on HuffPost, but maybe sometime, "we" hope?

                     Song

By Muriel Rukeyser

Make and be eaten, the poet says,

Lie in the arms of nightlong fire,

To celebrate the waking, wake.

Burn in the daylong light; and praise

Even the mother unappeased,

Even the fathers of desire.

Blind go the days, but joy will see

Agreements of music; they will wind

The shaking of your dance; no more

Will the ambiguous arm-waves spell

Confusion of the blessing given.

Only and finally declare

Among the purest shapes of grace

The waking of the face of fire,

The body of waking and the skill

To make your body such a shape

That all the eyes of hope shall stare.

That all the cries of fear shall know,

Staring in their bird-pierced song;

Lines of such penetration make

That shall bind our loves at last.

Then from the mountains of the lost,

All the fantasies shall wake,

Strong and real and speaking turn

Wherever flickers your unreal.

And my strong ghosts shall fade and pass

My love start fiery as grass

Wherever burn my fantasies,

Wherever burn my fantasies.

April 1955

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Magic water words

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
                      Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell

Governor Dayton has been holding a series of Town Hall Meetings around Minnesota to call attention to our water pollution problems. He's asking for suggestions on how we can make a 25% improvement in Minnesota's "water quality" by the year 2025. We have three suggestions that we'll make here. One, or perhaps two, we've referred to in prior postings, but we want to be unequivocal and explicit here. We think these suggestions are not only helpful, but essential, so we've included a bit of background and commentary to go with them.

Minnesota's waters flow to the Arctic, Atlantic and Gulf

Photo by J. Harrington

• First, mandate that the Minnesota Department of Transportation (for state roads) and each Minnesota county (for all other roads) install signs, where needed, identifying each watershed boundary and river being crossed by the road. In rural Minnesota we often see signs that say "Leaving So & So Soil and Water Conservation District," followed, a few hundred yards later by a sign that says "Entering So & So Soil and Water Conservation District." Each watershed needs similar identification, so folks will know who or what they're polluting when they throw empty cans, other litter, or cigarette butts from their vehicle windows. More hopefully, it will help us be aware of the beauty of the landscape and waterbody we're traversing. Many, but not all, river crossings are already identified. Few, if any, watershed boundary signs link landscapes to water bodies so folks know where they are in natural, bioregional instead of political boundary terms.






Sunrise River road crossing sign


Photo by J. Harrington



• Second, support creation of a Minnesota Waters' Lexicon of Water Words [MWLWW], including words old and contemporary, indigenous and immigrant, that refer to names and places, processes, persons and paraphernalia that give us a vocabulary we can use to talk about what makes our waters what they are. Take a look at this example using some English nature language that "highlight's what is being lost," or this one helps us talk about our food systems in sustainable terms.






• Next legislative session, undertake a major effort to complete full implementation of the Minnesota Water Sustainability Framework, first published in 2011. The Framework includes nicely organized table(s) of recommendations that can be used to keep track of progress.

[UPDATE: Submit your comments online if you wish at this link.]

Having spent much of our working life practicing and promoting water quality at a national, state, regional and local scale, starting with the development of pilot plans for managing water quality and land use relationships, we've been thinking about these issues for a long time. Then, a short while ago, we started to compile a list of "water words" from the wonderful Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez. More recently, we learned of the flap about the elimination of some nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to "make room" for 21st century terms. People have long been fascinated by the potential power associated with naming (cf. Book of Genesis, 2:19), but are often dismayed by the complexity and bureaucratic terminology that has become a substitute for "ground truth" (liquid truth?) used by public agencies to describe Minnesota's waters and "stressors" that affect them. Here's an example from our own local watershed, the Sunrise River. We suppose a MWLWW will need to find a way to accommodate and translate such jargon (gorgon language?) into plain language. It will also need to look again at Thomas F. Waters two great books, The Streams and Rivers of Minnesota and Wildstream, A Natural History of the Free Flowing River. What else do you think needs to be included?

                     Eschatology of the Lexicon

By J. Allyn Rosser

They come down to us

rounding the corners of centuries

at an innocent jog, shedding letters

and most of the grand old meanings

to take on the sleek new hide

our day demands, a snappier

nap that can repel the stare

of a rather less tactful sun;

they come down to us com-

pounding, bounding in idiot

joy, they come with that trustful

tired old mutt look, that soft woof,

warm doggie sigh on the knee,

hoping for what? Some reason,

no doubt, to continue sounding.

Give me one good reason,

they come down to us saying,

as if we could have one without them.

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Snakes (a)cross the road #phenology

We had to go into "The Cities" this morning on some financial business. The temperature was somewhere between mid-50's and low 60's. Two egrets were working the shallows of the Sunrise River pools near County Highway 36. After we finished our business, we met up with the Better Half at one of our favorite hangouts, Nina's Coffee Cafe. The BH had a work meeting that wrapped up about the same time as our financial meeting and we hadn't had coffee together for some time. Nina's still has some of the eclectic ambiance we used to really like, but it's picked up a hipsterish veneer that tamp's down a feeling of comfort we used to get. It's still one of the better coffee houses in St. Paul, but feels a little less user friendly to this aging hippie.

gopher snake sunning on gravel road

Photo by J. Harrington

Driving home, the temperatures had climbed into the mid-70's and the sun-warmed asphalt induced one large bull snake/gopher snake to warm itself in the middle of the west-bound lane. We fully, and regretfully, expect to see what's left of the corpse in the next day or so when we drive back that way. Later, much closer to home, while walking the dogs today we noticed the small, stiffening body of a redbelly snake near the edge of our gravel road. We strongly suspect it was "sunning" itself and the driver may well never have noticed it as the tires passed on the snake. We had always thought it was only in Springtime that reptiles warmed themselves on roadways. Clearly, that judgment was in error, although the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources mentions only one of the snakes in Snakes and Lizards of Minnesota as sunning itself both Spring and Fall. We bet that's simply an editorial decision and not a substantive difference among snakes. We also suspect that the snakes we've recently seen were not simply headed to their hibernacula although, again, that judgment could well be in error, it seems early for Winter preparations, especially since MNDNR writes that our snakes are active through October [p 3].

It looks like rain clouds are piling up. We're going to shorten this posting so we can go look for sunning snakes or wooly bear caterpillars before it starts to pour. Wish us luck.

Shaking the Grass

Janice N. Harrington

Evening, and all my ghosts come back to me
like red banty hens to catalpa limbs
and chicken-wired hutches, clucking, clucking,
and falling, at last, into their head-under-wing sleep.

I think about the field of grass I lay in once,
between Omaha and Lincoln.  It was summer, I think.
The air smelled green, and wands of windy green, a-sway,
a-sway, swayed over me.  I lay on green sod
like a prairie snake letting the sun warm me.

What does a girl think about alone
in a field of grass, beneath a sky as bright
as an Easter dress, beneath a green wind?

Maybe I have not shaken the grass.
All is vanity.

Maybe I never rose from that green field.
All is vanity.

Maybe I did no more than swallow deep, deep breaths
and spill them out into story:  all is vanity.

Maybe I listened to the wind sighing and shivered,
spinning, awhirl amidst the bluestem
and green lashes:  O my beloved!  O my beloved!

I lay in a field of grass once, and then went on.
Even the hollow my body made is gone.

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Approaching Summer's last hurrah? #phenology

We've been enjoying a nice, gentle, off and on series of autumnal showers today. The rain should dissolve the fertilizer we spread around those asters the Better Half just planted. Before the first shower this morning, we (the tractor and I) managed to get a few more buckthorns pulled. There are now several places where we can actually see all the way through the (soon to be gone) understory.

an advancing skirmish line of turkeys

Photo by J. Harrington

A handful of wild turkey hens and almost mature poults just went through the back yard, looking like a skirmish line. It would be great if turkeys actively fed on pocket gophers but at least they help control the tick population, although there's gazillions of little grasshoppers for them to feed on. Turkeys are always fun to watch but lots more fun to hunt in the Spring, when calling toms is the tactic. In Autumn, it's largely a question of just getting within range, more like deer hunting.

Friday's weather forecast continues to call for a high of 87℉, too hot to work much, followed by a drop back into the mid-sixties. We're still probably three weeks or so from our first frost. Then we'll be eligible for Indian Summer. (We're of the school that believes it's the first warm spell after the first hard frost.) If the indicator is that it must be on or near St. Martin's Day (November 11), perhaps we should start to substitute the term "Turkey Summer" in honor of Thanksgiving? Is September too early, even at midnight, for Indian Summer?

                     September Midnight

By Sara Teasdale

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,

Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,

Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,

Ceaseless, insistent.

The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,

The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence

Under a moon waning and worn, broken,

Tired with summer.

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,

Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,

Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,

Snow-hushed and heavy.

Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,

While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,

As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,

Lest they forget them.

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