Goldfinch Down!

I was away giving a talk to some master gardeners in Hocking County, Ohio, September 9 and 10. My gosh, that's nearly a month ago. It's all flown so fast. Probably a good thing.  I had the great privilege of staying overnight with my friends Jen and John at their gorgeous country retreat in the famed Hocking Hills of Ohio. How lucky can you get?

I got a nice dogfix from their Australian shepherds Winston and Jake, who were so happy to hike with us. They respond to voice commands. It has been so long since I've been around a dog who can hear, that this seemed like an extravagant luxury to me--calling a dog. Not having to run up to him and tap him on the shoulder so he'd look at you and have to guess what you were trying to tell him. It made me think of the old days, when a quiet word was all it took to bring Chet to my side. Heavy sigh.

I gazed for a long time out at their gorgeous meadow. In my appreciation was a keen sense of how much work it is to have and maintain a meadow like this. A view like this is a privilege, an obligation, and a hell of a lot of work. I just love the serpentine path John and Jen cut through it, inviting the eye and the boots to traverse it. And as someone with land to tend, who lacks the requisite heavy equipment skills to keep it open, I see it with a far more appraising eye than I would were I not in this situation. I look at this view and am awestruck. This view is about beauty, yes, but it also speaks of great vigilance and dedication. Those meadows don't stay open by themselves. It's a pitched battle between woody vegetation and the brush hog. Relax for a few months or a year, and the vegetation wins every time.

Too soon, my little escape ended, and I headed home. On the morning of September 10, I was filling the feeders when a wee bird fluttered out from under my feet. It was a goldfinch, and it was completely grounded, reduced to hopping around under the feeders, scrounging for its existence.

Uh-oh. Here I go again, thinking about entering a pact with an injured bird, one with unknown consequences for us both. I knew one thing: if I did nothing and "let nature take its course," as the wildlife officer likes to say, this baby goldfinch would end up in a chipmunk's burrow, being carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey. If I did something, its chances for survival improved dramatically. If what I did didn't work, and the bird wasn't releasable, well, I guess I'd deal with that on down the road. Maybe somebody would take it on. But who? That's the fine print I have to read on any such contract with a broken wild thing.

I mentally shuffled through the weeks ahead. When was my next big trip? Well, I had the Ohio Pawpaw festival in a week, but that was a day trip. I'd be speaking and showing my work at the American Birding Expo in Philadelphia (birdingexpo.com) Sept. 29-Oct. 1. My brain does a pirouette when I stand back to observe a hurt bird. All those things twirl around in there and then my brain spits out a ticket that says "Do it." And I lean down and close my hand around the bird, and our fates are intermingled from that moment on. And as I looked at the still-black bill of the bird, it hit me that it was probably still being fed by its parents. Oh, Lord. Please, please be able to pick up your own food. I can't force-feed a finch, can't get that slippery little conical bill open if you won't open it yourself. Ack!! What was I thinking?? Welp, too late to worry about that. I've entered the pact.

I picked up the little creature as easily as I'd pluck a candy wrapper out of the grass. I took her inside and held her by the window, stretching her wings out, looking for breaks and bruises. I could find nothing. She could move her wings in a normal way if she had to, but she could get no lift. She'd flutter through the grass, but couldn't get any altitude. All I could conclude was that she had a broken coracoid. This break, of a bone that's embedded in the pectoral muscle, can really only be guessed at, not seen on examination, but it will ground the bird as surely as a broken humerus will. It most frequently occurs in windowstrikes. I had little doubt this poor bird had hit one of our unprotected windows.

From shearwater.nl, here is a photo of a fulmar's pectoral assemblage. They're a lot heavier than the bones of a goldfinch, but the structure is the same.  You'll recognize the furcula as the V-shaped "wishbone." The coracoid is #2, running from the shoulder girdle down to the great big blade-shaped breastbone #1 (sternum). The coracoid serves as a strut for those big pectoral muscles that power flight and are anchored on the sternum, or keel, as it's often called. Mammals don't have coracoids, so calling it a "collarbone" is descriptive, but not really apt. You can see, looking at this structure, that if there's a break in the coracoid, the whole system of flapping breaks down, because the supporting strut has broken. Everything's moving around in there, and the bird can't get any power to its wings. Ow. Gotta hurt, too.

1. Sternum / breastbone
2. Coracoid
3. Clavicles / furcula
4. Scapula
5. Joint with the wing
6. Foramen trioceum

Coracoid: #2. That's probably what's broken here--the supporting strut for the wing. 

The good thing about a broken coracoid is that, given time, it can heal on its own. Like, two weeks' time. The coracoid is basically supported by surrounding muscles, so it's not flopping around loose. It can heal and the bird can regain flight functionality. But the bird needs a couple weeks' worth of rest in a small cage, and it needs to be in a quiet situation where it isn't tempted to flutter a lot.

All this I simply have to deduce, based on how the bird's acting and moving. It's an inexact science. Jumping in the car and driving a goldfinch 2.5 hours to the Ohio Wildlife Center and back kills a day, and it simply ain't gonna happen in my busy life. Down here in the most wildlife-rich counties in Ohio, where there's an immense need for wildlife rehabilitators, there are no rehab facilities, no veterinary backup. There are no options other than to take the hurt thing to Columbus, or to try to help it yourself. Anyone who opened a clinic down here in the southeast corner of Ohio would be swamped with patients from Day One.

 People around here care greatly for our wildlife--the constant phone calls I get attest to that. But the income base that could support such a facility through generous donations simply doesn't exist. See, the pile of money generated through oil and gas drilling doesn't stay here, and for the most part it isn't pumped back into the community. You in the big white trucks, we've invited you in.  We've fallen all over ourselves to take your bribe to drill our land. Bring in your tankers, your haulers, your rigs. Take our oil, take the money and run. All of you truckers come on. You drive too fast, smack down the middle of our little country roads and you run over some more of our wildlife while you're at it. Please, if you could be so generous, swerve back into your lane for just a second, and let my son in his little green Subaru make it to school, and home.

Hmm. It must be the growl of heavy equipment, floating in the window well before light, that inspired that last paragraph. There's heavy logging going on down in the holler, and I don't want to know what comes after that.

Her right wing doesn't look so good here, I know. She spent a lot of time resting it on the perch, which was exactly what she needed to do.  But I was willing to keep her in the studio for a couple of weeks, in the hope that one day she might fly again. And my brain was working, figuring out a way to perhaps help the healing process. Next: Goldfinch in a Turtleneck.

Love Lies Bleeding

It was a morning, typical in a miraculously atypical October. A warm breeze had played in my bedroom window all night, and I'd fallen asleep to the sound of crickets and burbling water from the pond just below. 

I'd gotten up and made breakfast for Liam, and seen him off to his dreaded Wednesday college chemistry class and lab. (He's taking his courses at our community college in his junior year of high school).

I'd gotten dressed and headed out earlier than usual, to watch the sun rise. It was another warm and breezy morning, another day in Paradise. First stop: the morning glories on the back deck, for obvious reasons.

With short, warm days and warm nights, these flowers get gloriously confused, and they stay open for two or three days instead of closing up on their first night of bloom. I don't understand the mechanism of it at all, though I've thought hard about it. Could it be humidity related? There's no dew on these dry warm nights. What makes a morning glory close up at the end of the day, anyway?

Whatever the  mechanism, they aren't closing. They're staying open for two or even three days.

When they're two days old, a violet hue creeps into them, brightening to fuchsia on the edges. It's...ahhh.

The net effect is an absolute carpet of blossoms in varying shades of true cerulean to cobalt violet. I had worried that my vines would never bloom before frost. Well, frost has been kind to them, and I get to roll my eyes around in morning glories all day long. Here it is November 2 and they're going strong through this fabulous autumn, the most protracted foliage spectacle I can remember. Every day I strive for the perfect, definitive, best morning glory shot. Every day I come a little bit closer. There is no such thing. That's why I keep shooting.

The growl, roar and beep of logging machinery was especially loud this morning, a bit less than two miles to the east of us. They're taking down a large tract of timber to drill a massive oil well.

This is probably the last photo I'll have of Longview Acres' little shed. The house came down weeks ago. 

The house site, straight on. 

I feel compelled to record what they're doing, what was here before they did it, and what they've left us to drive slowly by.

I still can't wrap my mind around this forest being gone. To be fair, it wasn't wilderness. Nothing around here is. Much of it was white pine plantation, that had been selectively logged, and it had grown up to black raspberries, greenbriar, and the happy confetti of red and sugar maple saplings, the kind of riotous tangle that's full of foxes, coy-wolves, deer, raccoons, squirrels, box turtles, American redstarts, yellow-throated warblers, hooded warblers, wild turkeys, and even ruffed grouse and bobcat--I had seen all of these creatures in and coming out of this tract. I'd even released a painstakingly rehabilitated one-eyed smashed box turtle right here years ago, where I found him when he'd been hit two years earlier. I'd sent him in a box poked full of holes by overnight Fed-Ex to New York State where a wonderful woman kept him for a year and a half while she healed his wounds. And then I'd driven 3 1/2 hours to Pittsburgh to pick him up in the autumn so he could go back to his home to sleep out the winter, to have another chance at living.

 So much for him, and so much for his home.

So much for our hearts as we drive slowly by. Looks like we'll have some handsome chain-link fencing to admire soon.

So these mornings I get up early and walk a mile east through the haymeadows and into the woods, where, if I drop below a steep berm, the sound of all this destruction is a little less obnoxious. At that point I'm three miles from it, and I can still hear it clearly, but it's not as bad as it is at the house. There I sit quietly with Chet and watch the birds and animals coming in to a game feeder on our neighbor's place. There's always action there, and it soothes me to see these animals take their corn breakfast. I don't think much of shooting deer over corn, but that's how it's done around here. It's all game cameras and time stamps and figuring out when that monster buck comes in so we can be there on opening day to drop him. Hmmm. However being an opportunist I am not above watching what comes in to their corn, and I absolutely love the beautiful paths my neighbors maintain through the woods, and the fact that they let me walk them whenever I wish. That privilege, I couldn't pay for. These men take good care of their land; they plant food crops for deer, and they are kind and friendly to me, and I respond in kind. They're good neighbors. They've bought a huge tract of land to leave it for wildlife. Far as I'm concerned, they can take all the deer they want. There are always more deer coming up.

This morning I walked out the driveway with Chet and I saw something I thought might be a white grocery bag that had blown in.  I quickly realized that it was the white belly of a deer, laid out in the grass.

I knew right away that someone had shot her, probably from the road less than 200' away. They'd probably pulled into our turnaround to get a bead on her. Oh, the bitter irony.

Disgust and anger welled up in me as I looked down on this little doe, wasted. So small--but nothing about her looked like this year's fawn. No trace of spots on the flanks.  Something about her domed forehead opened a cold sinking drain in my heart.

I knelt and looked closely at her forehead. One eye was higher than the other, an asymmetry I knew all too well.

I fell to my belly and looked at her right eye. Clouded and protruding, sightless, even in life.

Ellen.

They had killed my Ellen.

Blood still pulsed out of a terrible arrow wound that had smashed into the point of her left shoulder, into her heart and lungs. 

I hesitated a long time before I laid a hand on her. The pulsing blood, I could not explain, for she was stiff and still, her eyes already drying. When I touched her, she was cold. There was still a little warmth behind her ears, that had hung at such funny angles in life. Did her heart beat on? No, she was gone. Ah, Ellen. What have they done to you?

 The creep who killed this doe was engaging in a sport, widely practiced in my area, of dropping deer from their cars. What they do--and I saw three of them coming out together, in their loud beater cars and trucks just last night!--is shoot deer from their vehicles for fun. They drive by, looking straight ahead, and they never look me in the face. They are on a mission, but they aren't after meat.  They simply want to kill something. I can see it in their filthy faces as they pass. They leave them to rot and go kill something else. I find the carcasses everywhere, year around. And now I find Ellen, right out my driveway. If I could shoot a gun, I'd shoot out their tires and leave them to walk. If I had a rocket launcher...

 They wouldn't have recognized this doe, the way I could at hundreds of yards, just by the way she held her head. Had they known that hippie woman who lives in that tower house had loved her and written about her since 2009, they probably would have gotten an even bigger thrill out of dropping her and leaving her to lie right where I couldn't miss her. No, this dear little being was just something to sight the bow in with. Not even worth getting out of the truck to take. It takes a lot of skill to spotlight and shoot a half-blind elderly doe from your car at 200'.

The wound was a triangular slice, the hairs along it neatly clipped as with surgical shears, no burning such as you'd see with a bullet wound. So much for my theory that bow hunters take a more sporting approach to it all. 

I laid my hand on her domed forehead, the way I had so often longed to in life. Two tears rolled down. I did not weep. I couldn't. I think I've cried all the tears I have. I feel numb now, but oddly enough, stronger than I ever have. I feel I've been fired in a long, very slow kiln until my heart's crusted over.

I said a prayer of thanks that I had been so fortunate as to know her, to follow her through winter, spring and summer, for seven years. To see her through the terrible pain of losing one eye, to see her come out the other side, to see her grow her hair back, and pregnant this spring, with a swollen udder! at perhaps 9 years of age. A Methuselah among deer.

My first post about Ellen, March 1, 2009.

My second post, March 1, 2012. 

My third post, Feb. 24, 2015. 

My fourth, Feb. 21, 2016.

My fifth, Feb. 23, 2016.

My sixth, Feb. 24, 2016.

My seventh, June 26, 2016.

Here, they end.

The last time I photographed her: May 22, 2016, snorting at me.  I glimpsed her along the driveway once more on a summer evening, and it looked like she had two fawns with her, and she at least 9 years of age. But I can't be sure they were both hers. The only thing I'm sure of now is that I will never see her again.

Ellen was a survivor, until the wrong person rolled up to her and drew back his bow. I pity him, because he never knew her, because, taking it away so callously, he doesn't know that life is a gift.

What a gift Ellen was.

Go now, with your eyes that both work, with your supple neck, no longer kinked and lowered; with two ears that swivel as they should. There is a much better place for you than here. Thank you for everything, sweet Ellen. I'll be looking for your face in this year's fawns.

Ferberizing the Heart

I have to drive by two clearcuts now, to get to most of the places I want to go.  "I have to drive by two clearcuts." I realize that this is a first world problem. The Internet world being what it is, I'm glad that I get to be the one who's calling myself out on that faintly ridiculous statement, which, when taken in perspective with what my DOD called "real problems," sounds suspiciously like whining.

But as my personal shaman Shila says when I apologize for the occasional prolonged wail of despair directed her way, "Your problems are yours, and they're big and very real to you, and you get to voice them." That's called true friendship. I feel emotionally safe with Shila, and she with me, so when we share our worries and woes, we know the other isn't going to pooh-pooh it all or sweep it away as if it never mattered.

I've figured out by being a parent, and having had to Ferberize my babies to go to sleep by themselves**, that we all teach ourselves self-comforting behaviors. Some of us do this differently than others. Some cling to other people, try to find someone who can make them feel safe when the monsters come around. Some drink or eat more. I figured out years ago that pouring a depressant over one's sadness just makes it worse. Eating, well, yeah. That one is harder to quit doing. Some of us keep an actual written list of places and hikes that fix us, and refer to it frequently when feeling lost, at sea, beset or lonely. Some of us keep a stable of trees that we visit, like some kings once kept horses, which work on this or that emotional knot, and soothe us just by existing.

** The Ferber method, or Ferberization, is a technique invented by Dr. Richard Ferber to solve infant sleep problems. It involves "baby-training" children to self-soothe by allowing the child to cry for a predetermined amount of time before receiving external comfort. (Wikipedia)

Just as I must drive by the two clearcuts to get anywhere, I remind myself that I also must drive by the Three Graces. There is a little gravel lane, ironically enough what we call an "oil road," that leads right up to them, so I can swing the car in and document their beauty in every light and atmospheric condition. Since those change by the minute, not to mention by the hour and day and week and month, I will never be finished documenting their singular beauty. 

The oil road leading to the Graces terminates at a derrick, that pumps a shallow well, and this reminds me that the current occupation by oil and gas men is not the first for my oil-rich area. I'm told it is the eighth, the last one being in the mid 1970's. And each time, there were people, doubtless, who felt as we do about being overrun with people from points unknown, who don't know or apparently care about what was here before they got paid a lot of money to obliterate it. Who gather at long tables in every restaurant and haw-haw louder and drink harder than we locals can afford to. Most drive pickups, the supervisors' trucks being white; the workers' being some other color, and some have stickers that say, 

"Oil Field Trash--And Proud of It!" or "Wife of Oil Field Trash--And Proud of It!" 

It's a thing, and we notice it. Bit of a red flag, at least for me, when people go around referring

 to themselves as "trash." 

 They'll come in, make their money, cut a bunch of forest, drill a mile or more down, then leave, in what will perhaps be an eight-year term of residency, if that. They'll stay until the currently available technology for drilling past a mile into the shale takes all the oil it can, which is more than the prior technology could eke out. This little gravel lane to the Graces is a remnant of the 1970's occupation, the one that built our modest ranch house in a housing boom, and put three shallow wells on what is now our 80-acre property. And amazingly, it survived all that. 

So in some sense, I am here in this house, on these two 40-acre parcels, because of an oil boom. I gaze at the Graces and think these thoughts.

And then I drive on, to the bridge over PawPaw Creek, the place where Liam's fossil was found. 

When I get to Germantown Road, I always forget that I need to go right, not left, to get to one of my big medicine healing spots. 

So I take the wrong turn to the left, and I haven't gone 100 yards before a beautiful redtail stalls in flight and tumbles down like a huge buff and cinnabar leaf to land in the lane right in front of me. Objects look much farther away than they are with phone cameras.

 He stands his ground as I roll slowly forward, looking for any small creature, any reason he might have landed on the pavement. There's nothing. He's just standing there like Horus, at attention.

This is not the way to your healing road, he seems to say. You need to turn around.

I'm right on top of him, and still he stands, gazing at me. I'm smiling hard at this point, as I realize that I'm going the wrong way again, and this hawk, well, he's just staring me down.

A pickup truck approaches, and the driver slows to a crawl as he takes in the tableau of me, grinning like a fool, looking at a hawk who's looking at me. 

He pulls up right alongside the bird before it leaps into the air, clears his roof, and flaps off. "What was that?" he asks, and I suppress my first response: "You're at least as old as me and you don't know a red-tailed hawk when it flies up in your face?"

Instead I say, "Red-tailed hawk. Adult. I stopped because I didn't want him to get hit, and I wanted to see what he was doing."

He smiles at me and I feel compelled to say, "My father sends them to me." 

He looks puzzled, so I hurry on, telling him that my dad died in 1994, but he sends me hawks, routine hawks, or hawks in strange and sometimes outlandish situations like this one, to let me know I'm accompanied. That he's watching, and protecting me as best he can. Maybe even guiding me. Telling me I've made the wrong turn again! Or just saying howdy. Whatever he's doing, I'm down with it. I'm comforted by it. Hawkspotting is another of my adult Ferberization techniques. I don't say all of that, of course, but I almost do. I kind of condense it down, but he gets the gist. And doesn't roll up his window and take off.

Yep, I'm pretty much a raw nerve ending lately, telling little bits of my life story to complete strangers who I swiftly appraise by such traits as "Sensitive enough to slow down for a grounded hawk" and then deem worthy of confiding in. 

What have I got to lose? I've made friends that way. Good friends. If I've learned anything about myself, it's that I am not a fearful person. I am trusting. I start off relationships by trusting people, and they pretty much have to beat that trust out of me before I'll believe anything but good of them. 

We bade each other goodbye and I turned around to go the way I was supposed to in the first place, before the hawk tumbled down.

Soon we were there.

It is no accident that the clouds were just superb. I go to this road when the clouds are just superb, because I have a panoramic view from the ridge. There are other places I go when the clouds are not superb. Chet Baker is looking and sniffing and thinking how nice it will be to get into that habitat. I'm feeling thankful to have him along for the adventure, and thankful that I can choose such places for solace, and take this good friend along every time.  Don't miss his reflection in the mirror while you're ogling those mare's tails.

A faithful reader messaged me after my last, admittedly disconsolate post to ask if Chet was still with us. Oh my goodness yes. And good for a 5 mile trot any time I suggest it.

We got out of the car, and I squinted over to the next ridge. Right where the trees get thin, that's where we were going to go. Thin trees mean a great view. But we wouldn't go straight across the valley. We'd take the long way around.

Through the richly colored hallways of autumn

and its softly glowing rooms

we would descend into the beech-laced hollow

which a shaft of sun would light, and my heart would lift, because it had to. I have to keep walking. My dang heels hurt too much to run lately, but walking works, too.

All is not lost, the trees would tell me. You have this day, this road, these trees, your legs and your aching heels, and this little black dog to lead the way. Use them.

As I'm writing, it's another day, just such a perfect day, and I will have to go back out again for some more leaves and sky and miles. First I must do some work, work other than this kind of writing, which isn't so much work as it is Ferberizing, working on the hard, scarry knots in my heart.

We climbed the road toward Buddy's house, beautiful relic that it is, monument and museum to all that once was.

Thank God for these dirt roads, and shameless antic shagbarks that throw off their yellowing clothes at the first hint of chill. Some like it cold! The great oak looks on and chuckles. She's keeping her coat on until at least January.

All is not lost. So much beauty remains. It's up to me to seek it out, do my tiny part to appreciate and protect it and drive by the clearcuts as fast and straight as I can, keeping my wits about me enough to watch for the messengers along the way.

They're Drilling My Forest

There's a lot of stuff going on in Washington County Ohio, home of the much-vaunted Marcellus Shale, that upsets me right now. Every morning I wake up to the sound of huge industrial chainsaws ripping into a big patch of timber just two miles from our house. Two miles might sound like a long way, far enough, but I assure you it's not. Fifty miles might do it. But not two. For a woman who thinks nothing of running seven miles, two miles is right next door. I hear the saws snarling all day long, through the windows. I can't get away from it. But it won't last long. They'll be done soon, when the forest is completely gone.

That forest had yellow-throated warblers, American redstarts, hooded warblers, common yellowthroats...box turtles, red foxes, and once even a bobcat, that I saw eating on a road-hit deer. It had a newt pond, where the kids and I went a lot in the spring to see the newts floating, mating, swimming. It had everything. And I loved it, as I love all good forest.

Chet's so young he still needs a leash! And the kids...oh my. 

The newt pond. Going soon.

Sorry about that, newts. 

There was an old farmhouse there, with a porchlight that was always on, and of course I loved it too, out of all reason. I shouldn't have loved it so, because it wasn't mine, but that never stops a true old-house romantic.

I loved all the different coverings, real and faux, that covered its old log-cabin bones. I knew there was a log cabin under there. And there was. I'm told somebody dismantled it and took the logs for his house. Well, that's good. It didn't go completely to waste.

I loved all the greens on the porch. June 22, 2014. Wasn't Chet so beautiful then? 9 1/2 years old, before I gave him Nexgard, thinking I was protecting him from ticks. But that's another story. God, he was beautiful. And so was that house.

So were the outbuildings, with their ragged skirts hanging. That place was never so lovely as it was in a light rain.

The sweet old guy who owned the house, kept it up as best he could, mowed the lawn better than we mow ours, well, he died, as sweet old guys will, and his brothers up and sold the place and in came the oilmen.

Now there's a stoplight on our road. A stoplight!

A temporary one, but still.

There are hundreds of feet of pipe, and bulldozers.

They've torn down the house, 

and they're tearing down the outbuildings. They've left this one. I don't know why. Certainly not because it's beautiful. What do they know of beauty?

Beauty's just in their way.

They walk around in their neon shirts and hardhats and I snarl as I roll slowly by.

Here's what the same lot looked like this evening--only three days later. Oil companies work fast.

All that useless beauty--it's just in their way. They've got to put in the drilling rig, get to that oil. Gonna be some cement poured where there once were warblers and box turtles. Gonna be kleig lights on 24 hours a day, and drilling, drilling, drilling. This, the snarling chainsaws, is the good part. This is the quiet part. They'll drill hard and long, around the clock; they'll pump brine with God knows what chemicals in it between the layers of shale (but none of that is going to get in our groundwater, nossir, it's perfectly safe!!) they'll put up a huge stack, and the natural gas they release will shoot up that stack, and it'll burn for months with a ferocious crackling roar that one oilman I spoke with told me that he loved. Because, he cackled, rubbing his fingers together under my nose, "That's the sound of money!!" Well, it's more the sound of profligate waste. They burn off that gas, and it doesn't heat anyone's house or cook anyone's food, because it's under such pressure that it's dangerous, so they just burn it away. They're after the oil, not the gas, though God knows a lot of people could use that gas to heat their homes in winter. Just haven't bothered to figure out how to harvest that wealth from the earth...in too big a rush to suck up that oil. 

The flame of utter profligacy will light up the sky all night long, and it will light up my bedroom, two miles away. And I will hear it all night long, two miles away. I'm lucky it's not right next door. Maybe that's coming too. They keep us all on a need-to-know basis. Like, "Hello. We're leveling this forest, and we'll be putting up a drilling rig here, so you might want to move. Or you could stay, and listen to the sound of money. Our money." 

My friend in this house right next door to what was once forest knew when to get the hell out of Dodge. I saw him loading the last things from his garage into the back of his truck yesterday. I wanted to stop but he looked so stricken I honestly didn't know what I would say to him, so I kept driving. Now I know I probably won't see him again, and that hurts. They just ran him out. And who's going to buy that nice house? Nobody, that's who.

They've slapped a NO TRESPASSING sign on the little shed. Like they need to tell me to keep away from their moonscape. There's nothing left to trespass for. LONGVIEW ACRES, it says, with a sweet little Christmas tree drawn on the door.  View just got a lot longer. No trees in the way now. The newt pond's right below that shed. I pretty much know what's going to happen to it.

I sat down to write a post about the places that heal me, but I had to wade through all the photos I took as I drove out to get there. Being a photojournalist, albeit a bloggy one, I felt compelled to record this, too.  Devastation is what's going on in my life right now, so this post is what came out. I know you come here to get your dose of nature and peace, and no matter what has gone on in my personal life, I have provided little else but that for 11 years now. It pains me greatly to have to show you this. If there were something I could do about it, I would have. The greed is too powerful to stop. Everyone around us fell all over themselves to sign away their deep mineral rights to fly-by-night "companies" that blossomed like honeysuckle all over Ohio, promising riches to people who could sure use the money. We didn't sign, but that doesn't matter now. We're surrounded on all sides for miles around by those who did. The ever-changing companies move like amoebas, splitting and coalescing; the person you speak with, or even the company he worked for won't even be there a month later; they don't have to pay us anything now to take the oil right out from under us. They've achieved critical mass, and we're screwed, without the money to compensate us for our sorrow and pain.

I came home tonight in the gloaming, had to come through the fire, and emerge proofed by the flames. And on the other side were the Three Graces, waiting, their fall colors shivering in the last light, one mile from home, and one mile from the moonscape. A fragile bulwark indeed.

Not yet cut down, and may they never be...but one never knows. Sometimes it seems to me that being something Zick loves slates you for destruction.

I came up the sidewalk and looked at this little tableau of maroons and purples and greens that I'd created by our front door

and I thought, well, that sure is beautiful, those 34-year-old bonsai trees putting on a show for me, with the recalcitrant morning glory just beginning to bloom at the end of October, the Thunbergia vine gone wild and throwing little yellow flowers all over the boxwood hedge

and I pressed my nose against the warm lit kitchen window and saw Liam, just home from rowing crew, sticking his nose in a carton of Goldfish, taking a sniff, and deeming them still OK. He tipped the carton to his mouth and caught a glimpse of me standing there, staring in at him with a slightly clownish look on my face

and that scared the bejesus out of him, and he held his hand to his heart and gave me the finger, then started to laugh

and I laughed and laughed. Life goes on, and it is beautiful, but Lord, some of the stuff that happens in between is hard. 

UPDATE: There's a move to put parcels within Wayne National Forest, Ohio's only national forest, up for auction to private oil and gas drilling/fracking companies. Now's your time to get on the phone. I just called Regional Forester Kathleen Atkinson, who has full power to take this land off the auction block, and Sen. Sherrod Brown to register my objection to the rape of national forest. In the current maelstrom of dismantling and destruction, cries for sanity must be louder and longer. This link: http://www.acfan.org gives you all you need to know to make two phone calls. Thank you.