The 43rd Parallel

Newsfeed I

    I’m really terrified that more Ukrainians will die and that my childhood home and my parents’ home will be destroyed and I'll never be able to go back there.

WARMING OCEANS ARE GETTING LOUDER 

    Family says 11-year-old girl shot in head in Madison will be taken off life support

     the civil war has left more than five million people needing food aid, yet none has been delivered to Tigray since mid-December.

    this problem is more serious than The Power of the Dog itself, although it is inseparable from the offense of Campion’s misandrist, blasphemous anti-Western. Elliott’s unvarnished criticism (“piece of shit”) addressed the moral and credibility crisis evident in most contemporary films.

GUN-TOTING SPRING BREAKERS HIT STREETS

WINTER WOODWORKER TURNS OUT HUNDREDS OF ITEMS

    Quebec Maple Syrup Producers recently announced it was releasing about 50 million pounds of its strategic maple syrup reserves

 

 The Camera Eye (1)

    spring rains falling on the leaves that were never raked   and the drops drip on the window ledge because the gutter is not flush   without a TV it is quiet so I listen to the cats purr

    he once told me that he never wanted kids he died

    in a parking lot
    his sons over a thousand miles away
    alone

    a scarred hand lay carelessly on the sidewalk   lifeless it couldn't dial the phone for help  so he died there a body propped against the fence   found too late   cruel to die like his father   a scarred hand lay carelessly on the sidewalk

 

Aldo Leopold

    Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them, wrote Aldo Leopold. Now we face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.

    Leopold was born on January 11, 1887 in Burlington, Iowa. As a boy, his father would take him into the woods and teach him hunting. Leopold spent many hours during his boyhood outside. He climbed bluffs, wandered the woods, and sketched the birds he observed on his treks. A new forestry school at Yale lured the young Leopold out east and he graduated in 1909.

    After college he joined the U.S. Forestry Service and was assigned Arizona and New Mexico as his territories. In 1911 he became the supervisor for the Carson National Forest in New Mexico. Before leaving the southwest in 1924, Leopold had written the Forest Service's first game and fish handbook and helped to develop the proposal to manage the Gila National Forest as a wilderness area. It would become the country’s first official wilderness area in 1924.

    In 1924, Leopold pulled up stakes and headed to Madison, Wisconsin where he had accepted a position at the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory. Nine years later he published the first textbook in the field of wildlife management. Later that year, he was appointed to a new chair position - Professor of Game Management in the Agricultural Economics - the first, not only for the University of Wisconsin, but for the nation.

    In 1935, he and his family started spending time on a dilapidated farm along the Wisconsin River outside of Baraboo, some 50 miles north of Madison. The Leopold family planted thousands of pine trees and restored prairies. Documenting the ensuing changes in the flora and fauna further informed and inspired Leopold.

    He wrote about the changes at the farm looking to publish a book intended for a general audience. Unfortunately, just one week after receiving word that his manuscript would be published, Leopold died of a heart attack on April 21, 1948. 

 

Your Humble Narrator 

I love the springtime. Well, mostly.

The green is coming, warmer days are drawing near. It was a week or two ago when I was roused by robins just before dawn and heard the newly-arrived birds for the first time this year. Shortly after that I saw my first red-winged blackbird of the year. Unfortunately, I was driving so I didn't hear its stentorian cry. As stentorian a cry as a small creature weighing only a few ounces can muster, I mean.

While those male red-winged blackbirds are out looking for mates and a comfy nest near the water, out in the wooded areas, does are preparing to give birth later in the spring. Trees give serious consideration to budding and the grass contemplates growing while I dread pulling out the mower from its home in the shed to begin that weekly routine. Our cats are a little friskier now and Grabby is once again trying to sneak outside.

There's electricity in the air as we boreal types look forward to verdant scenes and shorts weather and, in general, getting out and about without donning heavy coats and masks and to cease cowering from Covid.

 

 ("Bicycle Mirror" by Doug E.L. Haynes)

It's been about 2 years since the pandemic began and with mask mandates ending, things are looking more and more like they did before March 2020. My spring is shaping up to be a busy one with a camping trip, several concerts, and many hours set to be spent at a cinema during the Wisconsin Film Festival on the calendar. Plus there will (hopefully) be much time spent on my bicycle cruising around the city and country alike.

Lately, however, I've been thinking back upon the past couple years and trying to tease out some lessons, to understand the changes wrought during that time. I'm a terrible prognosticator and haven't come up with any insightful thoughts about how history will view the The Great Pandemic.

In large part, my reflections have led to me feeling very fortunate. To the best of my knowledge, I never caught the virus and only a few people I know did. They felt like they were shot at and missed and shit at and hit for about a week and then they got better. Since I earn my keep by making computers bend to my will, I was able to work from home as the virus spread. I am very cognizant of the fact that many people didn't have that luxury. A little more came out of my pocket for the beleaguered food service workers each time we did takeout. Even without a pandemic ongoing, I am a fairly patient person but I tapped my equanimity reserves on occasion and never lashed out at anyone who earned a living in the service industry. Those people put themselves at greater risk of Covid exposure, dealt with a lot of assholes as they tried to get customers to wear masks, and struggled often times with product and staffing shortages. Oh, but how quickly they went from "essential workers" and "heroes" deserving of our eternal gratitude to lowly, unskilled labor for whom a living wage was unbefitting.

Since I was to be working from home, I got in the habit of taking morning walks down to Starkweather Creek. With the lockdown in place, Madison was quiet. At first it was a bit eerie - as if I were in an episode of The Twilight Zone - but it quickly became quite beautiful. Without streets full of cars, the city became a very different acoustical landscape. The sounds of birds became clearer with the rusty screeches of distant grackles joining the boastful mating cries of red-winged blackbirds in a wonderful avian chorus. The gentle footfalls of squirrels that would have previously been drowned out in the morning rush could now faintly be heard.

As the weather warmed, I decided to finally get that bicycle that had been given to me a couple years previously tuned up and ready for riding. I rode all the time as a young boy up through high school. After college I bought a bicycle and began riding once again. A career change led to a car and, a few years later, a job change led to taking the bus. Then, in 2019, inspired by a friend who loved to perambulate, I started to take long walks. Along comes Covid and I start biking again.

Part of adjusting to working from home was to get away from there, to remove myself from a seat in front of a computer. Having done my 8 hours, I would often hop on my bike and zip over to a park, with Acewood being a favorite. It was incredibly relaxing to sit on the shore amongst the birds with their chirping a mellifluous soundtrack as I watched a turtle go under the water and tried to find where it had resurfaced. Or to wait patiently for a muskrat to swim by. Cranes waded near the opposite shore as mallards lazily floated between wedges of geese preening themselves. What a joy it was to watch the animals go about their day and forget about the pandemic and computers.

Madison spends a lot of time promoting itself as a small city that's big on urban amenities with a cosmopolitan outlook befitting much larger cities. It devotes much less energy to bragging about its park system which is wonderful. Not only are there neighborhood parks everywhere that are grassy expanses dotted with playgrounds and basketball courts, but also parks that are natural retreats with only trails that wend through tall grasses and wooded areas. And I enjoyed the peace and solitude afforded by many of them as Covid raged in the distance.

I read Thoreau's Walden and A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. This wasn't a back to the country moment c.1970. I didn't move to a rural area and become a subsistence farmer. But, with society in lockdown, I availed myself of the opportunity to get to know the non-man-made Madison more intimately. Doing so has helped me see it as a community to which we belong and that it deserves our love and respect.

And so I am looking forward to the progression of spring so I can get out and enjoy the myriad of parks in Madison and also head out into the neighboring countryside on my bicycle. But the spring also holds the anniversaries of the deaths of various family members, most notable being that of my brother. My joy at the return of migratory birds and the renewal of life is tempered by melancholy as the anniversary of his death approaches. But I make my peace with his absence every April and then move on to enjoy the season once again.

I love the springtime. Well, mostly.