the wilds of Autumn

Each day we see more and more color in the local leaves. Still not dominant, but coming along nicely, especially around the low areas and wetlands. Tonight we have the season's first freeze / frost warning covering most of the state. We'll bring the mums and asters into the front hall and throw a sheet over the plant pots outside. Probably time to disconnect the hoses, too.

Autumn's colors developing

Photo by J. Harrington

This shift in temperatures is happening the same day the township and their contractors are paving our gravel road. We have, at best, mixed feelings about that change. Dust reduction will be nice but not if it comes at the expense of greater dangers from increased vehicle speeds. Plus, we'll not be expecting to see deer, or any other, tracks in the blacktop, nor many reptiles warming themselves on an early Spring day, although we may be proven wrong about the warming. We just don't know.

We've been reading another of Ed Abbey's books. This one a collection of essays titled One Life at a Time, Please. Mr. Abbey is known for having a dim view of much of what contemporary civilization refers to as "progress." As we age, we find ourself coming to be more and more in agreement with him about the downsides to many of the "benefits" of civilization. Climate change, confined animal feeding operations with flooded manure lagoons plus flooded and/or breached ash basins among them.

He's also known to have been a fierce defender of wild country, especially in the Southwest. Here are examples of what he fought to save: Rethinking Wilderness: Of Prairies and Deserts. We have a wild and scenic river just down the road apiece. It too looks like it needs more defenders. From the St. Croix 360 newsletter: Scandia gravel pit overflows, buries St. Croix Valley spring creek.

As we watched the heavy trucks, the blacktop machine, and the steam roller slowly proceed down what once was our gravel road, we remembered with fondness another of Abbey's works, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Try it! You might like it.

Wilderness

Carl Sandburg, 1878- 1967

There is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … I sniff and guess … I pick things out of the wind and air … I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers … I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for eating and grunting … a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me … I know I came from saltblue water-gates … I scurried with shoals of herring … I blew waterspouts with porpoises … before land was … before the water went down … before Noah … before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me … clambering-clawed … dog-faced … yawping a galoot’s hunger … hairy under the armpits … here are the hawk-eyed hankering men … here are the blond and blue-eyed women … here they hide curled asleep waiting … ready to snarl and kill … ready to sing and give milk … waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird … and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want … and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

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