Harvested By the North Wind

Friday morning started out gusty and then the full-on October north wind set in before dawn. This took down a lot of the ripe English walnuts from the tree just outside our window.

I went out this morning to collect as many as I could before the rodents-good and badget them. A coyote, the first I’ve seen in a while, scared the living daylights out of about eight jackrabbits. I heard mockingbirds, white-crowned sparrows, the muffled voices of cyclists zooming down the road, the cattle across the street, the occasional tomato truck, about five trains, and the dogs barking every time I shifted to the next patch of fallen walnuts-my boot cracking them noisily.

Long morning shadows
A coyote trots northward
The full moon, sinking

The Winery Downstairs

It’s that time of year again, when a new crush of students starts crushing grapes. The Davis Enterprise has a front page story today about the wine production class that takes place in the teaching winery next to Wickson Hall, the building where I work famous as the home of the UC Davis viticulture and enology department. It’s neat seeing the forklift moving around large bins of grapes when I come cycling in each morning.

I can’t say I’ve ever had any of their wine, but we in Wickson Hall have a special dispensation to have alcoholic beverages without a campus permit. This comes in handy for those champagne-and-cake office celebrations.

Full Moon over Walnuts

Numenius and I wandered out this evening to look at the moon. It may not seem like much, but it’s the first time I’ve been able to match his strides in this way since August 10th. The boot is still on but every day I get stronger. I am even walking with a shoe on my left foot at the PT’s, doing certain exercises with it.

The moon and the walnuts remind me it’s time once again to get busy making walnut ink. Since this involves simmering a huge pot on the stove for three days, the weather needs to cooperate. I was thinking this year of expanding my repertoire and trying to make oak gall ink; the valley oaks seem to have been hard hit in the last few years and the galls are lying about on the ground, ready for something. Sybill Archibald suggests that in medieval times the symbolism of the wasp-evil inversion of the bee, attribute of the Virgin Mary-meant that oak galls were a bridge between good and evil, and that the process of writing with ink prepared from oak galls was spiritual. I’m interested to try it, though I have no idea where I’m going to find ferrous sulphate.

Fandom and Place

This is not an official entry to the Ecotone Wiki, but Numenius and I were reflecting on how sports fans (we were specifically talking about baseball, but this can be applied to many different sports) identify themselves with a place primarily through their devotion to a team.

First, there is the locus of the team’s activity-say, Fenway Park, a place so steeped in baseball, Boston, and memory that Chris O’Donnell goes so far as to call it his ancestral place. Then, there is the “flavor” of the fans (A’s fans, for example, in no way resemble Yankees fans, either in dress, demeanor, or speech), not to mention the “flavor” of the players (a certain player can “look” like a Detroit Tiger. The Yankees’ attempt to transform Jason Giambi from an Oakland A into a Yankee was successful-up to a point. You can shave a goatee but removing tattoos from forearms is more of a proposition).

Much has been written about the diaspora of Boston Red Sox fans (called Red Sox Nation) and how they are identifiable in any ball park by their lack of belief in the possibility that their team might, perhaps, this year, do the unthinkable and win. There are those hunched shoulders, that diffident cheer. We all, no matter how far away from Boston we might live, sigh when we think about the uncomfortable seats at Fenway and the big green wall in left field.

Ohio Roots

A note on Ancestral Place for the Ecotone Wiki.

Both my parents grew up in Ohio, they meeting as undergraduates at Ohio State University in Columbus. My father’s side was the more recent arrival in the state; my mother’s side arrived first and settled in Lorain County, a bit west of Cleveland, around 1840 or so. There they stayed for well over a hundred years, apparently staying out of the limelight, working as small farmers and laborers.

One of these years I’ll poke around Lorain County to learn what I can about the lives of my ancestors and their land. In the meantime I’ll content myself with resources such as the Lorain County Genealogy page, and a memory of a winter birding trip up to Lake Erie during which I saw my first rough-legged hawk and northern shrike, and returned via the ancestral territory.

Oh, and I pronounce “root” with a short vowel. Is that an Ohio thing?

Northern Climes

A contribution to the Ecotone Wiki’s biweekly topic, Ancestral Place.

When I first moved to the United States from England, I was astonished by how important it seemed to be to people where you came from. This is of almost no consequence in England, where far more importance is placed on the way you speak, the school you went to, your name—all the important class indicators.

There are lots of class indicators here too, but they’re different, more hidden. Having “come from” (i.e. having “people” who “came from”) England places you on a higher social rung than having “come from,” say, Serbia, or Ghana, or Armenia. Much higher. Having “come on” the Mayflower (the fact that most of the people on the Mayflower were barely literate is irrelevant) gives you the highest cachet of all. Since I do, in fact, have a Mayflower ancestor, despite my English accent, my Ancestral Place is sort of a guessing game (I get asked where I’m from at least once a week).

But it’s mostly Lancashire, it turns out. Both sides. From sheep farmers to mill owners to petty bourgeois shopkeepers. Lancashire is a wet, soggy place, much blackened by the ravages of the industrial revolution and neglect from the center of power in the south, which no doubt contributed to the spread of nonconformist sects. Its inhabitants are gritty, silent, phlegmatic, and excellent cricketers (a sport that requires infinite patience). Lancastrians are given to interesting turns of phrase when particularly inspired.

I hope I have some of the resilience they are known for.

The Creatures of Autumn

Fall migration has been going on for some time now, but the birds that spend the winter here have started arriving just within the last week. The white-crowned sparrows are now busily rooting around the oleanders for seeds. They will sing all winter, cheerfully lighting up the short days. The Swainson’s hawks have almost all gone-we still have a lingering two or three that seem to be juveniles, crying pitifully in the morning-and the red-tailed hawks are coming in to take their places, down from the foothills for the winter.

Yesterday I went with some friends west to Bodega Bay, birding. The promise of eastern warblers in the trees of Owl Canyon along with the chance to see my mother lured me out of bed at 5:00 am (Numenius sensibly declined). We didn’t see many warblers, but another birder alerted us to large numbers of warblers in Point Reyes to the south. We all made our way there and were rewarded with an extraordinary number of eastern vagrants; I was able to see most of them even with my limited mobility. (Things are looking up in this department: I got the final insert out of my boot this morning, and am now able to walk almost normally instead of lurching about like a drunken sailor.) There was a nip in the air, well described by Lisa of Field Notes.

The birds remind us that the light is waning. It’s time to think about different dinners, different clothes. To think about abundance and to be grateful. I always, somehow, prefer this season to spring.

By the way, the next joint Ecotone topic will be Ancestral Place (October 1). Everyone is invited to write something about this and post an excerpt and link to it on the wiki.

Spiders in the House

There are spiders in the house. There were spiders here before I got injured dancing and carrying on; now that housework is severely limited, there are more spiders.

This is mostly fine by me, because the spiders eat the flies which sometimes get in, and the flies are awful. The spiders are overwhelmingly harvest spiders (“daddy long legs”) and when they don’t find flies to eat or moths or other creatures that appear at regular intervals, they eat each other. This is sometimes disconcerting, but I figure they have to make a living somehow.

There are a few other species of spider that live around the harvests. A wolf spider or two, a jumping spider. We tolerate these fine.

We do not, though, ever tolerate black widows in the house. Yesterday there was one perching over the door. I don’t know how it got in, but I took a well-aimed crutch to it. These spiders have the strongest, stickiest webs; the kind they try to emulate in ghost train rides at the funfair. The web was sticking to my cane, still, this morning.

The Isle Of Fabled Beasts

This is for the set of posts on Islands and Place for the Ecotone wiki.

Almost every day during my eight-year sojourn in Santa Barbara, I would glance seaward at Santa Cruz Island, about twenty miles off the coast. From our perch at about 1200’ elevation in the Santa Ynez mountains behind the town, the view reminded me of looking west across San Francisco Bay to the ridges of Marin and the Peninsula, especially when the fog was in. The island is mountainous with a 2600’ high ridge, similar to the ridges on the western side of the Bay where I grew up.

Despite its proximity I only visited the island several times. I think in all cases the occasion was a birding trip to look for the Island Scrub Jay, an endemic species found only on Santa Cruz Island. Biogeographers delight in islands for their evolutionary treasures, and the Channel Islands off California provide much material. There are many species and subspecies of plants and animals endemic to the Channel Islands. The scrub jay, the Catalina ironwood, the island kit fox, and lots of others.

In the Pleistocene, when sea level was lower and the Northern Channel Islands were connected to each other, there were even pygmy mammoths there, horse-sized creatures four to eight feet tall. It is believed they could swim between the island and the mainland.

Who’s to say magical islands don’t still exist?.

Clusters As Islands

This post is part of the Ecotone Wiki’s joint topic, Islands And Place.

What does where we live say about who we are? A very great deal, according to Michael Weiss, author of The Clustering of America and The Clustered World. His point is that people generally tend to live near people like them. He calls these groupings clusters, and he has divided them into 62 discrete types. They function, for all practical purposes, like islands.

Weiss’s research has been a boon to marketers, who are able to target, say, Kellog’s Pop-Tarts and Domino’s pizza to the cluster “Greenbelt Families,” who are also most likely to drive Mercury Capris. Greenbelt Families are young, upper-middle-class town dwellers, predominantly white, whose ideology is moderate independent. They are found in high concentrations in places like Parkville, Missouri and Hyde Park, New York.

Unlike the members of the “Sunset City Blues,” mostly retired, married white folks who live in places like Battle Creek, Michigan or Merrillville, Indiana, and who buy cigars, lottery tickets, and pain relievers in high quantities.

You can enter your zip code at the Claritas site to find out what clusters are found in high concentrations in your area. For non-US residents, there are similar efforts in the UK, Spain, and Canada.

For the record, Numenius and I fall under the “New Eco-topia” cluster, people described as most likely to have a computer on the kitchen table, eat organic foods, and support recycling. By the wisdom of the clusterers, we should be living in Westminster, Vermont. An island of people like us.