Mark What You Leave

Just a quick note to apologize for the lack of posts lately. The reason is spam, and I’m not referring to the Monty Python variety. It seems that spammers have discovered the blog and just can’t resist posting offers for an entire apothecary of pharmaceuticals, one drug at a time. My favorite is a fellow (I assume) who favors free Eastern European web hosts. This person begins posting offers for drugs beginning with “A” and continues right on through the alphabet until he gets to “Z”, then begins the cycle all over again. It’s sort of like watching the seasons unfold, only he gets through them all every couple of days.

In the meantime, I’ve taken to using Google’s Language Tools to craft complaint letters to hosts. I get a certain satisfaction at being able to send someone a letter in Romanian or Slovak, despite having only a year of German and a year of French in my past, a past that’s receding at least as fast as my hairline. It’s also gratifying to see how quickly some hosts reply (in Polish, for example) that the offending accounts have been deleted. The posts continue for a while, sporting dead links, then shift to some new server and we begin the game anew.

Anyway, my spam count just passed 3,500. I hope none of it is getting through. On the other hand, time spent dealing with it is time that can’t be spent on other pursuits, like blogging. That’s this week’s excuse, anyway.

Cheers…

Cover of The Wild Birds' Song, by Jim Coplen

One of my goals in life is to hike the Appalachian Trail. It’s the sort of thing I probably should have done when I was in my twenties, but it didn’t happen then. Whether it will happen in my fifties (or beyond) remains to be seen; I did manage about 60 miles of northern Georgia on a 2007 section hike. That was only five days, whereas completing the entire 2,100+ mile trail typically requires five or six months, sometimes more. I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to free up a weekend, much less six months. In the meantime I enjoy reading books about the AT.

I was intrigued by the positive reviews of one such book, The Wild Birds’ Song, by Jim Coplen. Coplen, like me, lives in Indiana, and like me, he’s not in his twenties anymore. In fact, he hiked the trail at 58. So naturally, I sent away for a copy. It took awhile, as it seems to go out of stock pretty quickly, but eventually the book arrived and I started it forthwith.

Most books about hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT) chronicle trips that begin in Georgia and proceeded north to Maine. That’s probably because most hikers head north with the spring. Coplen chose to hike south, and I found the change of perspective that his account offers both refreshing and a little disorienting. There’s less emphasis on the social aspects of the trail than is typical for these books, perhaps because the south bound community is much smaller and diffuse. Aside from a relatively small cast of characters, the emphasis is on the hiking.

I can’t say much more without giving away important elements of the story, but suffice to say that Coplen has his shares of ups and downs, both literal and figurative, but he eventually makes his way to Georgia. In the process, he seems to have discovered more than a trail. I recommend this book.

I received a Google Alert today that included a link to a brief note from the Indianapolis Business Journal. In it, the mayor of Kokomo, Indiana advocates linking his city to Indianapolis via high speed rail.

Kokomo bills itself as the “City of Firsts”. Among those was one of the first gasoline-powered vehicles. Since that time, Kokomo has been heavily involved in the automobile industry, and thousands of residents still earn their living making parts for automobiles or serving those who do. And now the mayor is on board with high speed rail.

I see no reason why rail and autos can’t coexist, and if there’s to be a high speed rail line in Indiana, it seems somehow appropriate to include the “City of Firsts”. As I’ve written elsewhere, the burgeoning interest in rail here in the heart of automobile country is very encouraging. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.

If you’re like we are, you’ve been receiving a steady stream of mail order catalogs in the mail.  Christmas is fast approaching, and that’s when catalog companies rack up much of their sales for the year.

Trouble is, we’re not interested in most of the catalogs we receive, and my guess is that you aren’t either.  For that matter, I bet the companies that send out unwanted catalogs would probably rather not spend money sending to folks that aren’t going to buy anything from them.

There’s an alternative: Catalog Choice/ offers a way to get off mailing lists. You’ll save the trees and energy used to produce and ship unwanted catalogs. And as our friends over at Yours In… suggest (and who pointed us to Catalog Choice), you may even save a trip or two to the recycling center.

If only there was a way to do the same with computer spam…

The three photos that follow are from a very distinctive plant I saw in several locations in downtown Phoenix during late October.  The plant looks like a shrub or small tree, with some specimens that were maybe 7 or 8 feet tall.

Each plant had dozens of these spectacular flowers.

The first photo is of the large orange and yellow flowers.

Seed pods

The second photo is of some seed pods.

Compound leaves

The third is a shot of some foliage.

These last two images suggest (to me) that this plant may be some kind of legume.  But I have no idea.  For all I know, the plant may not even be native to Arizona.  Help?

I just returned from a couple of days in Phoenix, Arizona. I didn’t bring back any profound observations. It’s an enormous city, or complex of cities, set in a desert valley. More than three million people live there.

Most of all, it is dry. Very dry. When flying in and out of the airport, I saw little sign of water, except what was in swimming pools, and very little green, aside from golf courses. I rode the Red Line city bus from the airport to my downtown hotel, and things looked drier still from ground level. It seems unlikely that rainfall is sufficient to supply the residents with the water they use. Presumably, much of it comes from somewhere else, perhaps the Colorado River. I can only imagine how much that must cost, and wonder if the price paid by water users reflects anything like its true financial and environmental cost.

There was plenty of water available in my hotel room. The last time I was in Phoenix, about ten years ago, I was disappointed to see that the shower fixture in my room had only two settings - “off”, and “torrent”. This time, I was pleased to see that it was possible to reduce the water flow considerably, even if it was not as much as I would have liked. I’ll take that as a sign of progress.

Phoenix Light Rail along Central Avenue

Another sign of progress - Phoenix was testing a new light rail system. I didn’t get to ride, but a twenty mile segment is set to open to passengers by the end of the year. Local papers carried stories about impending development projects along the new line, offering hope that the city would begin realigning itself away from the automobile and towards more sustainable forms of transit.

I was stuck in meetings during most of my visit, and didn’t get far from the center of downtown. I did see a small park on a visitor’s map and set off one evening, walking about a mile to the north, where I was disappointed to find not free living plants and animals, but a carefully ordered, symmetrical layout of concrete and plantings. An inquiry at the transit center about city buses to South Mountain Park - the world’s largest municipal park, apparently - produced momentary confusion.

Eventually, though, the transit folks came through and found a route that they said passed about a mile from the park entrance. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time for the out and back bus journeys, the walks to and from the park entrance, and the shower and change of clothes necessary after hiking so far in the hot sun. Maybe next time.

Aldo Leopold quotes the poet Edward Arlington Robinson thus:

“Whether you will or not
You are a King, Tristram, for you are one
Of the time-tested few that leave the world,
When they are gone, not the same place it was.
Mark what you leave.”

Mark what you leave. That’s wonderful advice, even for those of us who aren’t kings. Each of us, in a lifetime of doing, leaves a mark, however small. Let’s leave good ones.

It seems to me that light has a special quality this time of year. I don’t know why that is, or even whether it is. Maybe it has to do with the elevation of the sun in the sky, the angle at which light strikes the earth, or maybe there’s something different about the air that the light passes through before it reaches us. Or maybe it’s just my imagination. Still, I can’t shake the notion.

It came to mind this past weekend when I was walking through a local park not far from my home, and I stopped momentarily to look at something odd on the bottom of the small stream that winds through the preserve. I finally decided that it was a child’s rubber ball, about the size of a baseball. But while I was puzzling that out, I noticed that the water seemed remarkably clear.

Even the deeper pools that were ordinarily dark and mysterious were fully revealed. As I stood and stared, all sorts of details became obvious, from the wavy patterns in the sand on the creek bottom to the shadows cast by newly fallen leaves as they floated by, helpless. A small school of bottom-feeding fish, new to my experience, swept to and fro across the bottom.

Now maybe I could see so much because there’s been so little rain here, and the creek is lower (and shallower) than usual. Or maybe the lack of rain has also meant less sediment in the creek, thus improving visibility. But I still think it has something to do with the light at this time of year. I’ve noticed this phenomenon before, and it’s always in the early fall.

I watched for a long time, transfixed by the soundless scene before me. Then, in the corner of my eye, I became dimly aware that an adult and three children were approaching. They seemed to be trying to figure out what I was looking at. As I turned to explain, the oldest child, a teen-aged girl, lobbed a large rock into the middle of the pool. Her younger siblings followed suit. Fish scattered; ripples coursed back and forth over the pool like miniature tidal waves. My fellow humans moved off noisily. The spell broken, I continued on my own journey.

After we moved into our suburban home a few years ago, we let the lawn service go, and in the interim have acquired a vast and varied collection of plants in our yard.  Some - dandelions, ground ivy, crab grass - are usually thought of as weeds.  And I suppose they are.  I’m afraid that the presence of these ground-hugging invaders fails to fill the neighbors with joy.

However, we’ve noticed that our yard now seems to be more alive, as if it now serves as a tiny oasis of relatively chemical free territory that supports not only more species of plants but more kinds of insects, spiders, birds, and other cohabitants. Tiny butterflies flit about, and fireflies wink on late summer evenings.

Of course, virtually every living thing is viewed as food by some other living thing, and the residents of our yard are certainly no exception. So we should not have been surprised when we noticed this fall that we were being overrun by predators with sharp, pointy claws and unblinking eyes. I’m referring of course to the praying mantis.

Praying Mantis

I presume that the “praying” part of their moniker arises from the way they hold their forelimbs, but to me they look more limp-wristed than reverent. In any case, the single-minded focus and ferocity of their attack certainly leaves all but the most zealous of human true believers lagging far behind. And their outsized eyes, perched on either side of a large, triangular head, give them the countenance of a Star Trek villain.

One of my faults is that I like to put names on things, and so out came the Peterson Field Guide to the Insects, by Borror and White. It informs us that the two species of mantids living in the northern states are introduced. That is, they are native to other countries. Based on the size of the specimens we were seeing - at least four inches long - I decided that our mantids were Chinese Mantids, Tenodera aridifolia.

Now, that bothered me. First, because I didn’t already know about their non-native origins, and secondly because I have long believed that introduced species are usually disruptive to native ecosystems. Yet I’d always been told that mantids are beneficial insects. Indeed, they are available from various garden supply companies, sold as “natural” predators. Presumably they eat a lot of pest insects that attack our food crops.

So now I’m wondering whether I should like mantids, or instead view them as a threat to native species. Either way, they are here to stay, and judging from the number of mantid egg cases that we’ve found scattered around our shrubbery like so many golf-ball-sized chunks of hardened foam, we’ll have more next year.

Mantis egg case

The mayor of Indianapolis has announced plans to construct about 200 miles of bike lanes in his city.  I’m not convinced - given the current level of uncertainty and turmoil in our nation’s economy - that this will actually happen.  If anything, governments will probably pull back on projects as they conserve funds for the tough times that appear to be barreling down upon us.

But I’ll take the announcement as good news, even if the lanes aren’t built anytime soon.  Why?  Because it represents a change in thinking in a city that has carried on a long, strictly monogamous, even obsessive love affair with motor vehicles.

Indiana bills itself as the “Crossroads of America”, and has lived up to its label by constructing one of the densest networks of interstate highways in the country.  And Indiana is a world center of the auto racing phenomenon.  This is a town that adores gasoline powered vehicles and has earnestly built itself to accomodate them.  Many major streets lack even sidewalks, and pedestrians are often viewed with pity or even a certain degree of suspicion.

It wasn’t always this way.  In the early decades of the 20th Century Indiana had an impressive light rail network - the Interurban - that spanned the state.  The automobile and government road building projects swept it away.  Now, higher gas prices have prompted a renewed interest in rail and other forms of transit.  A single light rail line may begin operating between Indianapolis and an outlying community sometime in the next five years.  Or maybe not.

In the meantime, lots of intrepid folks have taken to commuting on bicycles.  I salute them, but I’m not ready to join them.  It’s dark here during morning commute, and between the poor visibility and the lack of adequate separation between bikes and cars, the whole enterprise strikes me as unacceptably dangerous.  There’s also the potential for causing gross offense.  I couldn’t complete an eighteen mile bike ride and work in an office the rest of the day without an intervening shower, and change of clothes.  There are no showers at work.  No shower = no bike ride.  And did I mention how cold it gets here in the winter time?

Those are my excuses, anyway.  No doubt many of these problems (perhaps, if Al Gore is right, even the cold winters) will lessen over time, but time they will take.  All the more reason to celebtrate any movement, or even talk of movement, toward more sustainable ways of getting around.  If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.