Evening Walks

My wife and I celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary this year.  Thirty good and enjoyable years together.  While we have many divergent interests we hold many in common too.  One thing that we enjoy doing together is taking an evening walk.  For thirty years we have walked together in the evening.  When our sons were growing up they were part of that tradition.  It has been a good time to talk about our day’s activities, our interests, and to observe our surroundings.  It is good outdoor exercise too.

We walk on the hottest days of the year, although on those days we often wait until the sun goes down.  We have walked in winter when the wind chill was twenty five degrees below zero and the wind was blowing so hard you could hardly stand up.  We have been out in blizzards when you couldn’t see more than twenty feet.  We walk in the rain but we draw the line when there is lightning, heading for shelter at the first sign of that.

When we lived in town we would walk to the library, the car dealership, or the Grocery Bag for their giant (real) ice cream cones.  For the past 17 years we have walked a two mile route on a township road that has little traffic on it.  It has a couple of good hills on it to help get the heart pumping.  We have seen barred owls and bluebirds, little ring-necked snakes and red efts.  We have watched bolides streak across the sky and break into a hundred pieces.  We have seen the aurora borealis.  We wave to our neighbors and speak to their dogs and little children when they come running out to the road to greet us.  We speak to the neighbors too when they take the time.  All on our evening walks.

Evening walks are good for relationships and good for the soul.
 

Good Coffee

I come from a family of coffee drinkers.  I still remember the hot bitter-sweet taste of my first cup.  It was at Christmas in my twelfth year.  I asked my mom if I could have a cup with dessert…it was nut torte.  They tasted so good, the nut torte and the coffee.

I don’t drink flavored coffee and I usually don’t use cream, have never used sugar and rarely do I drink decaffeinated coffee.  I like it first thing in the morning and I can drink it before I go to bed although I usually don’t.  It doesn’t pump me up or keep me awake; in fact I have been known to nod off in my chair after a hard day holding a half finished cup.  I have stopped drinking it cold turkey for periods of up to a month with no withdrawal symptoms, nary a headache, although I did miss that hot bitter-sweet flavor in my mouth.  I usually have two cups in a day, rarely as many as four.  Never more than that.

I always drank ordinary coffee but several years ago a coffee shop opened in town that sold premium coffee.  It was a little expensive for my sensibilities but I started drinking a cup from there on Saturday mornings.  A year or two after it opened, we took a little trip further out into the Midwest to visit family in Iowa and Minnesota.  I stopped as we left town to get a cup of coffee at the coffee shop.  I spent the next five days looking for a good cup of coffee and annoying everyone within earshot with my rants about not being able to find one.  What had happened to me?  I don’t know even to this day but ever since I have purchased my coffee in foil bags…Starbuck’s at first but then Seattle’s Best.  Every so often I can buy a good cup (like at the Caffe Ibis in Logan, Utah) but more often I prefer what I brew at home.

With the prospect of the reduced income due to my approaching unemployment and semiretirement, I am returning to coffee that comes in a can.  One of my brothers put me on to Yuban Dark Roast.  Good coffee.  I am happy to be returning to my ordinary coffee roots. 

Good coffee…

Spiritual Life

I live a world of spirits and of hard science and mathematics.  A world full of ancient mysteries and, what are for me, fresh insights.  A world of nature and of work in the city.   A world in which the best times are often dominated by stillness and utter silence.

How is it that a man can ignore the spiritual part of his being?
 

Clouds

As a child I would lie on my back on a summer day and study the clouds, looking for familiar shapes…faces, ships, locomotives.  Now I look at them and wonder. 

With a little bit of study you can learn the different types of clouds.  Each type has observed characteristics allowing them to be identified.  Each type also has meteorological characteristics that indicate the type of weather associated with them.  So if you watch the cloud type, the wind direction, and the barometric pressure, you can get a pretty good idea what type of weather is headed your way.  I know these things but my interest in clouds goes beyond whether it is going to rain today.

I like to sit on the deck in the evening after supper and think about things.  The other evening, the clouds caught my eye again.  A few small fractocumulus clouds were passing by, pieces of them blowing loose in the wind and dissipating in the drier air around them.  They are constantly changing their shape and size as they move on across the sky.  I wonder about the moisture in them, where it came from.  I wonder about the temperatures, dewpoints, pressures, lapse rates, and winds that control their appearance.

An airplane can fly through them, although sometimes it can get pretty rough even in fair weather.  Certainly, you could walk through them easily if you didn’t have to deal with the winds.  They float along in the air like a feather but they hold tons of water.  We had a summer thunderstorm several years ago in which we got 2.5 inches of rain.  I calculated that on our 53 acre farm that amounted to 3.6 million gallons of water weighing 14,900 tons.  That storm moved on across the state, still raining.  Clouds hold a tremendous amount of water.

I love to watch turbulent clouds with all the swirls and eddies.  I love to watch building cumulus storm clouds as the towers blossom and explode into the sky and then flatten off as the upper level winds shear the top into an anvil.  I love to watch icy cirrus clouds stretched thin by fast high altitude winds.  The colors range from the purest white to almost black with silver through every shade of gray filling out the range sometimes with a pink, purple, red, blue, or even green tint to them.

Yesterday they were over the Great Plains, tomorrow they’ll be out over the Atlantic.
 

1 cm^3

 

Have you ever thought about 1 cubic centimeter?  It is about the size of a sugar cube.  Here on earth every cubic centimeter has something in it.  Water, air, wood, plastic, solid rock, human being, mashed potatoes. Something.  How about a cubic centimeter of soil.  How much can you say about that little cube of soil?  You could weigh it.  You could measure it and calculate its fractal dimension.  And then its surface area.  You could talk about its chemical composition and the biological materials in it.  And about the worms, insects, bacteria, and viruses that live there.  About nematodes and nitrogen fixing.   About carbon sequestration. You could talk about its temperature and how much water it can absorb.  About the nutrients for plant growth, about its specific heat.  Then you could think about how much energy it absorbs from the sun and how much it reflects.  About how much energy it would produce if we could completely convert its mass.  You could talk about its origins from the erosion of ancient mountains and decayed vegetation. Or about the cosmic rays that pass through it and about the ones that are captured by it.  You could write a book about that one cubic centimeter of soil.  Then you could write another one about a cube from a thousand miles away and a third one comparing the two.  Then choose something else but remember, only one cubic centimeter.  Any bigger might be too complex.

Isn’t this a wonderful place, this earth?

Senegal

 

My wife raises sheep.  We live together on a small farm but my wife is the farmer.  I do other things.  I try to help out though where I can, usually with the mechanical, non-biological things like mowing, cleaning the manure out of the barn, unloading the feed, cutting up trees that fall on the fence, mending the fence…things like that.  Sometimes, though, she leaves town on business or to visit family.  Then the chores fall to me.  She makes them easy for me, mostly, and I get along fine with them, mostly.

There have been times that I haven’t gotten along fine, like the time two of them died before she got home.  It wasn’t anything I did or didn’t do, but they still died on my watch.  And then there was the time that I waved to her as she drove down the driveway and as I turned to go back into the house, noticed that a ewe was down up in the pasture.  I went up to check her only to find that she had dropped a new lamb.  My wife hadn’t told me about this possibility.  I picked up the little one and coaxed her mom into following along down to the barn where I could take care of the two of them.  I think those two survived.

They are my wife’s sheep.  Over the years though, when she has been gone there is some kind of deeply buried shepherd instinct that shows up in me.  The flock depends on me to provide water and feed.  Sheep are not known for their intelligence so the old ewe depends on me to get her head out of the gate that she has gotten it stuck in.  And the little lamb depends on me to get it untangled from the portable fencing that it tried to run through.  I have developed the slowness of movement required to move among them without getting them all stirred up.  I have also learned the hard way not to turn my back on a ram.  They can hurt you.  But they are my wife’s sheep.

She has a ram right now by the name of Senegal.  He is a Katahdin and he gives you the impression, albeit probably false, that he is a little more intelligent than the other breeds we have had.  This spring when his duties were done with the ewes my wife put him in the lower north pasture by himself.  You could tell right away that he was lonesome.  He stood at the gate and made sheep noises.  Then he went through his ram behavior, challenging the gate, the fencepost, whatever.  One morning as I went to work, I stopped and spoke to him.  He ran along the fence following me down the driveway.  After that he went into a kind of listless depression.   I felt sorry for the old guy so I went down and scratched his brisket.  He seemed to like the attention.  Senegal…my friend. 

But I still don’t turn my back on him.  And he is one of my wife’s sheep.

Mowing with Friends

It is the time of year to start mowing the pastures.  It is hot work.  The sun beats down on you even under the sunshade on the tractor.  The dust from the mower gets all over you and makes your skin itch.  When there is poison ivy in the field it gets on your skin and you itch for days.  The pollen and dust get in your nose and you sneeze enormously.  Then your sinuses clog.  I never really look forward to mowing season.

But after I get started, it is usually relaxing and satisfying work even in spite of the sun, dust, and poison ivy.  This year has been especially enjoyable.  The weather has been a little cooler during the week past.  And I have had help.  I always have in the past years too, but this year I appreciate it more.  The barn swallows and phoebes join me in the fields when I mow and follow along with me.

In the lower north field the phoebes sit on the fence, always just a panel in front of me.  When I get too close they flit to the next panel.  Around the pond they sit on low branches, waiting.  Once I turn and go another direction they swoop in for a meal.  Phoebes are flycatchers.  With quick turns, flutters of the wing and abrupt drops they pursue and catch small butterflies, skippers, and other insects all the while keeping me company as I mow.

In the other fields the barn swallows follow me.  They catch bugs that I stir up too.  But they are in constant motion.  They circle the tractor in tight, highly banked paths then swoop in right in front of the tractor.  Then they seem to disappear only to come swooping head on right at you, turning away at the last minute.  As a human, it looks to me as if they are showing off their aerobatic skill but they are probably just chasing bugs.  They are beautiful birds, semi-iridescent midnight blue in color with reddish brown accents.  And their flight is so graceful. 

It has been great this year, mowing with friends.

SL9

In March of 1993, Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker and David Levy discovered an odd comet.  It had broken into pieces due to a close encounter with Jupiter and was now strung out along its orbit like a string of beads.  Shortly after its orbit was determined, everyone realized that it might actually collide with Jupiter.  Nobody knew what would result if that happened.  Some predicted spectacular events; others thought the pieces would just disappear into the planet without a trace. 

The day finally arrived, July 18, 1994.  The spectacular camp won.  Every telescope in the world was pointed at Jupiter.  The photographs on television showed huge black spots on the planet.  That evening, I took my little 6″ f/6 Newtonian reflector out on the deck to take a look at it. 

The seeing was variable.  It was mostly poor with short periods of clarity and stillness.  I put in my most powerful eyepiece and took a look.  Nothing.  It looked like Jupiter always looked.  I got out the contrast filters I use on my camera for black and white photography.  The red and blue filters didn’t help.  Then I put on the yellow.  In one of the times when the atmosphere stilled, I thought I saw something down on the lower right limb.  As I watched the biggest spot slowly rotated into view.  It was awesome without compare. I could see it.  I could see it with my little, homemade telescope in northeastern Ohio.

The Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact into Jupiter was a once in a lifetime event.  Nobody had ever seen this type of event before it and nobody has seen it again since.

It was another time in my life when I was struck by the raw power of the natural world.  But more than that, by its order and predictability.  Gene Shoemaker spent his life studying impacts.  He and his wife along with David Levy were looking for earth crossing asteroids when Carolyn found SL9.  They were trying to understand the danger we face here on earth from objects from space.  They found part of their answer on Jupiter.  I feel fortunate to have been able to see it too.

Gifts

 

It is a cool June morning with a stiff breeze.  I sit alone in the living room.  Sixteen stainless steel staples hold my belly together.  The pain is less than it was a few days ago but there is something about having staples in your belly that sets a person on edge.  My blood pressure is up and I feel isolated and unnatural.

Part of my recovery regimen is to walk, to keep the abdominal muscles flexible and from going into spasms.  So I find my jacket and struggle to put my shoes on and then to tie them.  Off I go down the lane toward the pond.

As I reach the pond a little blur of motion catches my eye.  A little hummingbird is working on a cattail left over from last year, gathering fluff for its tiny nest.  No bigger than my thumb, it moves with the precision of a modern machine tool.  Position, advance, extract a bit of fluff, pull back, position, etc. just like the machines I used to work around.  In that moment, my blood pressure must have dropped ten points. 

Unless you have a feeder or better yet, flowers, you may never see a hummingbird.  They are so tiny and quick.  And yet, over the years I recall seeing them often.  Whether sitting on a branch high in a tree, showering in a spray of dewdrops driven airborne off of a large leaf by the vibration of its wingbeats, or laying dead on the ground, a spot of red on its breast, its heart pierced by the sharp beak of a rival, hummingbirds are another reminder of the larger world that we live in but to which we are almost totally oblivious.

As I think back on the years of my life to this point, those little reminders and the time that I have spent reflecting on them have added meaning and enrichment to my life.  Many come from the natural world but some come from our human history and culture too.   In a larger sense, they also provide an anchor to something solid and secure amidst what seems to be an increasingly chaotic and tumultuous human existence.

These observations cannot be forced.  They are gifts.  You must just allow time and place to be open to them even in the midst of your busy life.   Then be patient and wait for your gift.  When it comes, it will be like a breeze through the window on a hot summer night.

June 12, 2006