I seem to be spending a sizeable chunk of my internet time checking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Service website for the 10-day forecast for our area. Although my usual interest is to see if there is any rain in the near-distant future, I started relying on the forecast to see if we would have a freeze. I had planted many summer-friendly plants in pots, and since we've had an unusually warm autumn, with leaves still clinging to thirsty blue oaks and goldfinches forgetting to fly south, many of the flowers were still blooming at Thanksgiving. I wanted to cover those plants that might be shocked by an overnight freeze or two. It turned out to be several overnight freezes (like a week or so) and several more near-freezes, along with mild-to-warm days, continued dry weather (only bordering, according to the terminally optimistic newscasts, on drought, although we've broken records for dry year and warm days), and an unprecedented number of in-a-row spare-the-air days. Folks are upset, it seems, that they can't have their Yule logs this season. I haven't heard many complaining that the native plants and trees can't have their seasonal drink of water, although there was (thank you) an opinion piece in the Napa Valley Register about the effects of drought (and consequent dry creeks and sandbars) on the Coho salmon that usually are able to find their way upstream to deposit their eggs.
Each day, when I visit the NOAA site, I spend a little more time watching the animated satellite images from 4 kilometers above the Western U.S. I have stared--no, glared--at that high pressure area that has parked itself stubbornly and ineluctably over the state of California. For a time, through most of November, the high actually took on the shape of California, with its edges squared off at the northernmost border, draping in a virtual straight line down the Pacific coast, with somewhat feathered edges on the other side of the state along the Sierra Nevada range. Occasionally it lifted its Eisenglass skirt to allow some cloud cover and precipitation in Southern California, then defensively dropped it back down to prevent any penetration by wayward weather.
Clouds, clouds everywhere, and not a drop to drip on us. There have been ravishing storms and raging floods elsewhere, alternating with drought and wildfires. A Wikipedia summary of the year: "The 2013 extreme weather events included several all-time temperature records in Northern and Southern Hemisphere. The February extent of snow cover in Eurasia and North America was above average, while the extent of Arctic ice in the same month was 4,5% below the 1981–2010 average.[1] The Northern Hemisphere weather extremes have been linked to the melting of Arctic sea ice, which alters atmospheric circulation in a way that leads to more snow and ice.[2] "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_extreme_weather_events
Now, that's Wikipedia, not me, claiming that the weather patterns have something to do with melting of Arctic sea ice, which in turn, we could assume, might have something to do with global climate change. I'm not ready to assert that our (not quite) drought and warm fall/winter weather is caused by climate change, because I hate it that every time there's a snowstorm somewhere in the world the "deniers" sneer and chuckle with disdain, pointing to the snowstorm as proof that there is no such thing as global warming.
I'll limit my commentary for today to the reality we are facing here and now. Our well continues to threaten desiccation; we are scrounging the last bits of manganese- and calcium-thickened dregs and I'm committed to no more than three or four showers a week. The plants I've been protecting from the freezes are at risk of dying of thirst, because I dare not use the well water on them and our water collection tanks would now be empty had we not had water delivered a couple of times.
I would merely like to point out, for those willing to see, that we need to think seriously about water conservation. A near-full reservoir is not a guarantee of continuing availability of water. The fact that vineyards can now have water delivered to meet their growing needs in a dry year doesn't mean there isn't a growing problem with groundwater levels. I've been trying to conserve water for about 50 years now, having spent my early years in desert environments and a couple of years as an adult living just south of the Sahara. I'm still waiting for complacent, conventional wisdom to notice the dry grasses and burning bushes.
In the meantime, I'll keep staring at that animated satellite image over and over again. I doubt my visual meditations will melt that intransigent high pressure area, but I'm mesmerized by the clouds that swirl around it trying to get in.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Dante Allegro
Haltered, he turned with difficulty in response to light tugs on the lead rope. He had wedged himself in the stall sideways, trying--as he had become accustomed to do--to pin Rosie in the back near the manger. Dante was a horse with attachment issues, and Rosie his current object of attachment. He fairly panicked when she was out of his sight, and he could rest assured that wouldn't happen if he blocked her exit from the stall.
But this time, he was blocking his own exit. His legs--the fronts rigid from ringbone and the hinds limp from stretched ligaments--were failing him. Standing was painful, and he shifted from one hind leg to the other, allowing his now torqued front feet to absorb most of his weight. Walking had become slow and awkward since his last shoeing a week earlier, and turning was now an ordeal. You could almost see his walnut-sized brain using every available synapse to plan which feet he should move where, and in what order. By the time he was facing me, he seemed too tired to take the first steps forward. Or in too much pain.
The vet was waiting at the bottom of the hill, near the house. We had only to get him down the incline, which he hadn't tried since walking down to see the farrier the week before. His ligaments had been weakening for over two years now, and we had kept him going on a cox-2 inhibitor and stable rest for the greater part of those two years. He had been happy, as had Rose, the old mare we got to replace the other old mare we had gotten to keep him company a few years after he had lost his first old mare, Megan. He didn't lose his mares easily. He cried for weeks when Megan died. When I say cried, I mean whinnied in his childlike, high-pitched way, day after day, for hours at a time. And then he whinnied back at the echo of his whinny from across the canyon. When he finally gave up whinnying, he seemed more than resigned; he seemed depressed. I spent a lot of time with him back then, sitting on his back and reading a book as he wandered around the property eating grass, taking him for walks and letting him follow me back when I returned to the house, going on short trail rides until he had one of his crazy spells, then either letting him go to run back on his own, or facing the challenge of riding a four-legged pogo stick along the narrow trails to the house.
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| Dante and Megan |
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| Grazing at the pond |
His ringbone started causing problems for him around the time we bought Jessie--a thin but well-trained old mare--to be his stablemate and my stable steed. It turned out she had some eating problems as well as Pigeon Fever, and after six months we had to have her put down because of severe, painful colic and twisted intestines, probably caused by hard, calcified formations in the intestines called mesoliths. Dante was once again in emotional agony, and called out for her for days. By a stroke of good connections, we were able to replace her with another old mare--this time a stocky, healthy quarter horse--owned by the farrier who shoed the horses owned by the man who had buried both Jessie and Megan. Dante had only about a week to grieve. When I rode Rose up the driveway bareback, with only a halter and braided cotton rope to guide her, Dante whinnied an elated greeting and was happily partnered for his remaining five years. But during that time, perhaps from excitedly running up and down the pasture hill after hale and hardy Rosie, the ligaments in his hind legs started loosening up until his fetlocks sank almost to the ground as he walked, then as he stood. But still, he was happy to be with Rose, and seemed content to be our aging colt, our over-sized puppy, our oppositional, distracted, unpredictable, developmentally challenged, yet endearing horse.
It was twenty-one years to the day since we had bought him, then a spunky 2 1/2 year old gelding. He never lost his spirit or his personality.
On the way down the driveway from the stable to the waiting vet, he moved carefully, stopping every second step or so. I had insisted on bringing Rose down with him, because he was becoming nervous as soon as we had them both haltered up and the vet had come up to administer Rose's yearly shots. He wouldn't take his eyes off her, and as Marc urged him to descend, he nervously glanced back to make sure Rose was with him. She was only behind him by a neck, and their bodies were almost touching. Still, he stopped and waited until he could see her. Then, as I held her back slightly to let him negotiate the final decline and turn, he whinnied, turned his head, and waited. I pulled her ahead a little, and he picked up his pace slightly, not quite andante, to follow.
As soon as he was sedated, his head drooping almost to the ground yet managing to keep his balance, I walked Rose slowly away to take her back up the hill. He seemed not to notice, yet Marc says he could tell he was trying to follow her with his eyes, turning his head slightly in her direction. Dante worried about losing her. He had no way of knowing he was losing himself.
It was only later in the evening that Rose whinnied--once, then again--to see if he would answer. She had heard Marc walking on the gravel, and thought perhaps Dante had returned from wherever he had gone. Unlike Dante, Rose has probably seen it all. Horses who don't come back, her own foals disappearing, perhaps even sniffing the reality of death. She didn't seem to sniff or cry for Dante, and called for him only once more, during the night. He had gone nowhere; was lying on the gravel below her, outside her line of sight, waiting for a truck to pick him up and take him away.
Rose seems to have learned to accept whatever fate the humans dealt her. Dante always had something else in mind--he was a horse of his own making, self-willed and full of folly. We did our best to make him ours, and he did his best to set his own terms.
"Come on Dante," we'd cajole.
"Commandante," was what he heard.
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| Dante and Rose |
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Deer in the Pool Light
In his Opinion extracting the teeth of the Civil Rights Act, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts pointed out that times have changed since the Act was passed in 1964. "That was then and this is now," he all but said.
Marc and I went to the local dump yesterday, to deposit the pool cover that was saturated with the smell of carrion. An unsuspecting fawn had no doubt stepped en pointe onto the edge of the blue bubble plastic, gingerly, but not gingerly enough to pull back when the cover gave way, yet delicately enough that we failed to hear the splash and thrash which usually brings us dashing out of bed to the rescue. Although the past two days had been hot, we had left the pool covered, allowing it warm up a bit after the surprise of a rare, early summer storm that drizzled and chilled us for a good three to four days. I was filling my watering can at the rain harvesting tanks in order to soak some plants before the scorch of an anticipated, week-long heat wave, when I noticed two of our calico cats sitting at the edge of the pool, looking at the blue plastic as if ready to pounce on a trapped, errant lizard. Then I noticed the bulge under the cover, the odor from which I was unable to detect until I lifted up the edge and saw a deer's hind leg.
I called for Marc, and began reeling back the cover. The fawn, from one of two families that have been hanging around our house, still had its spots. Its mouth was open as if screaming for help. If we had heard it, we would have helped. Instead, we lifted it out of the water onto a rubber pond liner, and put it in the skip loader on the tractor. Marc took it to the back and dragged it up the hill a bit, so it could at least nourish some of the other wildlife.
The night before, I had dipped in the shallow end of the pool, pulling the cover back only far enough to permit me to do a few leg kicks from the edge. I looked down the length of the pool, contemplated opening it up to swim, and settled for pool aerobics instead. I saw no bulge; either the deer wasn't there, or it hadn't yet risen to the surface. I looked up stages of carcass decomposition on the internet, and concluded it had been in the pool more than a day.
Later, when we unreeled the plastic to cover the pool for the night, we realized it smelled strongly of dead deer in the second stage of decomposition. We folded it, removed it, and Marc later dragged it down the driveway to the gate. In the morning, we loaded it into the bed of the truck and drove the three miles or so to the dump. I went along to look for materials to use in my current project: deer proofing discrete areas of our yard, so we don't have to fence in the whole yard and deprive the deer of access to water in our pool and small pond. I suppose it would make sense to just build a fence and let the deer find the stock pond a quarter mile away.
I hadn't been to the dump in years. Marc and I had acquiesced--an outgrowth of a couple of surgeries to deal with my creeping arthritis--to a certain division of labor in our household which freed me from some of the heavier chores, such as hefting loads of scrap wood, metal and broken patio umbrellas out of the back of the pickup truck onto the junk heap at the dump, or engaging in political debates with Bill, the aging conservative dump manager. I had remembered Bill as a stocky, grizzled redneck type with ruddy cheeks, gruff manner and a sun-bleached glaze of right-wing judgment in his blue eyes. Marc's reports of his incendiary tirades, trading anti-liberal invective for pots of Texas chenille cactus hacked from our oversized plants, had discouraged me from helping Marc discard our unwanted junk, even after my hip had fully healed and I was better able than ever to balance, lift and heft. When I returned with Marc, Bill had traded grizzled for wizened, redneck for mountain man, and ruddy cheeks for a steel gray, straggly, foot-long beard that tapered off into two points.
He no longer looked judgmental, but had replaced the look with caustic taunts. He started with a double-edged compliment when I introduced myself.
"You're way prettier than Marc said you were," he said jovially through the passenger-side window.
"Oh well, at least he's honest," I said, surprising myself with my own double-edged retort. I didn't know exactly what I meant by the remark or where I might go with it, but Bill found a direction.
"No, he can't be honest," he said. "He's an Obama supporter."
I muttered something like, "Honesty goes with that territory," as I got out of the truck. Bill started pacing a bit to rev up for the mini-rant that was to come.
"He's spending your tax dollars visiting some black house. Some 300 year old place or something like that." I assumed he was referring to the slave-trade house in Senegal which Obama had recently visited.
"That's a part of history," I suggested.
"Oh, yeah. Those people's history." He was self-righteously agitated, and seemed fully satisfied dividing history into "us" and "them." I let it drop.
Marc has been letting it drop since the interaction with Bill right around the time Marc's father died. Bill and a visitor to the dump were tossing verbal darts at Marc about Obama, making no effort to buffer the pointed racial barbs. They were two angry old men attacking a liberal for his support of a black president. Marc said as much, and it seemed Bill had calmed down a bit after that. We spent the rest of our visit talking about the possible uses for some wrought iron fencing Marc and I were hauling back to the truck from a perilous hill of discarded metal. As we got into the truck, we overheard Bill telling his friend that the sun was actually cooling, and it was known that at some point in the distant future the whole universe was going to explode anyway (...so we don't have to worry about global warming, now, do we?). We got back home before our thermometer had reached 110 degrees, the second day of an upward trend that would last at least four more days.
This is now. Let's deal with it productively, using current information, enlightened awareness, and all the adaptive skills we can muster. And let's listen for the sound of frantic thrashing in the middle of the night, and be attentive to the silent cries of those drowning, and watch for signs of disintegration, and attend to the problem in time.
Marc and I went to the local dump yesterday, to deposit the pool cover that was saturated with the smell of carrion. An unsuspecting fawn had no doubt stepped en pointe onto the edge of the blue bubble plastic, gingerly, but not gingerly enough to pull back when the cover gave way, yet delicately enough that we failed to hear the splash and thrash which usually brings us dashing out of bed to the rescue. Although the past two days had been hot, we had left the pool covered, allowing it warm up a bit after the surprise of a rare, early summer storm that drizzled and chilled us for a good three to four days. I was filling my watering can at the rain harvesting tanks in order to soak some plants before the scorch of an anticipated, week-long heat wave, when I noticed two of our calico cats sitting at the edge of the pool, looking at the blue plastic as if ready to pounce on a trapped, errant lizard. Then I noticed the bulge under the cover, the odor from which I was unable to detect until I lifted up the edge and saw a deer's hind leg.
I called for Marc, and began reeling back the cover. The fawn, from one of two families that have been hanging around our house, still had its spots. Its mouth was open as if screaming for help. If we had heard it, we would have helped. Instead, we lifted it out of the water onto a rubber pond liner, and put it in the skip loader on the tractor. Marc took it to the back and dragged it up the hill a bit, so it could at least nourish some of the other wildlife.
The night before, I had dipped in the shallow end of the pool, pulling the cover back only far enough to permit me to do a few leg kicks from the edge. I looked down the length of the pool, contemplated opening it up to swim, and settled for pool aerobics instead. I saw no bulge; either the deer wasn't there, or it hadn't yet risen to the surface. I looked up stages of carcass decomposition on the internet, and concluded it had been in the pool more than a day.
Later, when we unreeled the plastic to cover the pool for the night, we realized it smelled strongly of dead deer in the second stage of decomposition. We folded it, removed it, and Marc later dragged it down the driveway to the gate. In the morning, we loaded it into the bed of the truck and drove the three miles or so to the dump. I went along to look for materials to use in my current project: deer proofing discrete areas of our yard, so we don't have to fence in the whole yard and deprive the deer of access to water in our pool and small pond. I suppose it would make sense to just build a fence and let the deer find the stock pond a quarter mile away.
I hadn't been to the dump in years. Marc and I had acquiesced--an outgrowth of a couple of surgeries to deal with my creeping arthritis--to a certain division of labor in our household which freed me from some of the heavier chores, such as hefting loads of scrap wood, metal and broken patio umbrellas out of the back of the pickup truck onto the junk heap at the dump, or engaging in political debates with Bill, the aging conservative dump manager. I had remembered Bill as a stocky, grizzled redneck type with ruddy cheeks, gruff manner and a sun-bleached glaze of right-wing judgment in his blue eyes. Marc's reports of his incendiary tirades, trading anti-liberal invective for pots of Texas chenille cactus hacked from our oversized plants, had discouraged me from helping Marc discard our unwanted junk, even after my hip had fully healed and I was better able than ever to balance, lift and heft. When I returned with Marc, Bill had traded grizzled for wizened, redneck for mountain man, and ruddy cheeks for a steel gray, straggly, foot-long beard that tapered off into two points.
He no longer looked judgmental, but had replaced the look with caustic taunts. He started with a double-edged compliment when I introduced myself.
"You're way prettier than Marc said you were," he said jovially through the passenger-side window.
"Oh well, at least he's honest," I said, surprising myself with my own double-edged retort. I didn't know exactly what I meant by the remark or where I might go with it, but Bill found a direction.
"No, he can't be honest," he said. "He's an Obama supporter."
I muttered something like, "Honesty goes with that territory," as I got out of the truck. Bill started pacing a bit to rev up for the mini-rant that was to come.
"He's spending your tax dollars visiting some black house. Some 300 year old place or something like that." I assumed he was referring to the slave-trade house in Senegal which Obama had recently visited.
"That's a part of history," I suggested.
"Oh, yeah. Those people's history." He was self-righteously agitated, and seemed fully satisfied dividing history into "us" and "them." I let it drop.
Marc has been letting it drop since the interaction with Bill right around the time Marc's father died. Bill and a visitor to the dump were tossing verbal darts at Marc about Obama, making no effort to buffer the pointed racial barbs. They were two angry old men attacking a liberal for his support of a black president. Marc said as much, and it seemed Bill had calmed down a bit after that. We spent the rest of our visit talking about the possible uses for some wrought iron fencing Marc and I were hauling back to the truck from a perilous hill of discarded metal. As we got into the truck, we overheard Bill telling his friend that the sun was actually cooling, and it was known that at some point in the distant future the whole universe was going to explode anyway (...so we don't have to worry about global warming, now, do we?). We got back home before our thermometer had reached 110 degrees, the second day of an upward trend that would last at least four more days.
This is now. Let's deal with it productively, using current information, enlightened awareness, and all the adaptive skills we can muster. And let's listen for the sound of frantic thrashing in the middle of the night, and be attentive to the silent cries of those drowning, and watch for signs of disintegration, and attend to the problem in time.
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