Fathering, part 17

This afternoon I was out raking the last of the leaves, a chore I had put off all weekend hoping the sun would come out but it never did. Not long after I’d gotten started Grace came out and asked if she could help. I said, “Did your mother make you come out?” She said, “No, I haven’t helped you with the raking yet this year and I thought I should.” I’m not sure if I could explain why it made me so happy to hear that.

Grace and I work well together, trading off parts of the work without having to talk about it. When she gets tired of raking she starts crushing the leaves in the bags, or when she steps back from the bag I hold out the shovel to see if she wants to scoop for awhile, which she usually does. It’s so nice to work with someone where the work is done cheerfully and doesn’t have to be discussed or ordered. We should all have more of that in our lives.

I started the raking a little grumpy because the sun hadn’t come out. 27 bags of leaves later (making 66 for the season total) I’m feeling lucky.

“Because forgetting is another kind of extinction …”

When I was recently traveling in Switzerland, I was awed by the swirling flocks of starlings. Randomly, they came pouring out of trees in great wheels, winding and splitting around power lines, looping over Lake Geneva. Starlings make a pretty awful racket up close, something like an ungreased machine screeching and writhing. But in flight they inspire quiet and awe.

You don’t see flocks like that anymore in North America, but they once weren’t uncommon. In the 19th century, passenger pigeons alone could darken the sky in their great flights. At one point they numbered about 40 percent of the wild birds on our continent. Over about 50 years they were slaughtered in great numbers for their meat, and in 1900, the last wild bird was shot by a young boy in Ohio. The last passenger pigeon died in captivity in the Cincinnati zoo in 1914.

Sculptor Todd McGrain has been on a mission to memorialize the passenger pigeon, and four other species of birds that have disappeared, mostly at the hand of humankind, during the past two centuries. He says, “Preventing absent-mindedness when it comes to extinction is what I’m trying to do.”

“… I read the German immigrant’s letter about a leafless tree in Minnesota, covered in Carolina parakeets and conjuring a memory of a Christmas tree from the old country, I thought, how could this be a story that I don’t know?”

Beginnings and Endings: Utne Reader Moving to Kansas

Utne Reader, what I once characterized as the bathroom companion for the young and liberal, and which this article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune characterizes as “the Reader’s Digest that compiled ‘the best of the alternative press’ “) is moving from the Twin Cities, where Eric Utne founded it in the 1980s, to Topeka, Kansas. Whether this is a move that will keep it afloat in these times where so many hallowed publications are failing or it’s a last gasp before it dies, we will have to wait and see. It certainly is another marker that things we love are changing, or being changed.

I hate to admit it, but I am not sure I ever bought a copy of Utne Reader. I tended to find copies – at people’s houses, in cafes, in bookstores – and always found something interesting, new, thought-provoking. It had a different sensibility to other publications, even alternative ones: more thoughtfulness, less splash, less anger. I hadn’t realized it had grown up in the Midwest, and at the time wouldn’t have known what that might have meant, had I known it. Now that I live here in the old Northwest, it makes all the sense in the world.

The magazine isn’t closing – it’s moving down to Topeka to the headquarters of the publisher who bought it six years ago in the hopes of making some money from it. At least it’s not out of our region (as I idiosyncratically define it, at least). But it is a sign of that shift in news and art and publishing that the old institutions are changing and failing and the new ones, in this still nascent internet age, are still taking shape. A reminder that the best things have their brief times when they shine wonderfully but that they aren’t forever. And we possibly shouldn’t want them to be.

Farmers Get to Choose Between Poverty and Husbandry

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune had a good article highlighting a dilemma that farmers will face in upcoming seasons: choosing between conservation and care of environmentally sensitive tracts on their lands and plowing that land under to squeeze out more dollars while crop prices are high.

For the past 25 years, the federal government has compensated farmers for maintaining environmentally sensitive lands as grasslands instead of plowing it under. This has had the dual benefit of maintaining some natural habitat as well as putting a cap on crops – all things being equal, a farmer might try to plow every inch of his or her land, theoretically offering a little extra cash, but, when everyone does it, ultimately driving prices down and causing ruin. This is the kind of program that is often portrayed by opponents as “paying farmers not to farm,” suggesting images of farmers sitting on porches, doing nothing and growing rich. (I want to see that farmer, if he exists anywhere – clearly people who create and believe this stuff don’t live anywhere near farm country.) In fact, the program has covered less than 10 percent of land in Minnesota (which is the state with the most participation), and the land is generally hilly land that might erode easily. With the land in native grass instead of under the plow, it’s led to decreases in soil erosion as well as significant reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus flowing down the Mississippi and contributing to the “dead zone” off the coast of Louisiana.

But now, with austerity the word in Washington, your good representatives in Congress are eyeing the program as a great way to save billions of dollars over the next decade or so, so that we can maintain our low tax rates for rich folks. And farmers, meanwhile, are realizing that if crop prices stay where they are, they can make more money by plowing that land. The long-term harm from doing so either won’t be felt in their lifetimes (even though topsoil takes thousands of years to grow, there will still be some of it left by the time they retire) and the downstream effects, including water pollution, don’t really effect them.

Gratitude, continued

This morning my children and I were out in the woods at a local lake, waiting in the predawn twilight in hopes of seeing deer. We were out of luck on the deer; the kids had trouble sitting still in the dark and even so agreed that it was worth it to listen to the quiet and the wind rifling through the stiff grasses and the tweets and twitters of the early birds.

The sun finally cracked the horizon and we decided to take a hike down the trail that rings the lake. Suddenly out of the woods came a fanfare of horns, the harbinger of late fall. The trumpeter swans are back to Lake Rebecca from wherever they roam in northern Canada during the summer. They are a miracle every time I see them, and they make my heart jump with delight.

Fortunate

On Tuesday, about a third of the school districts across Minnesota held out their cups for money. Amazingly (to me, anyway), in nearly 4 out of 5 districts, voters approved extensions of local levies to support operating budgets and capital projects like building repair and technology upgrades. Coming from where I do – other states across the west (Colorado, California, Arizona) where voters consistently refused to support education – it’s gratifying to share voting districts with other people who are willing to put money into their children and their shared future. When I lived in Denver, people in the surrounding suburbs occasionally decried us as “socialist” (literally) for passing levies to support schools, not to mention also the zoo, museums, and parks (even though the affronted in these cases were not affected by the vote). Here it’s not a city vs. suburb issue, or a red district vs. blue district issue, which is gratifying.

Blessings

This morning while curving along a curving county road through dark woods I thought about the Dow crashing down crazily yesterday. And then I was up on an overpass, bursting into the bright sunshine and merging down onto the interstate. The maple woods were bright green and for the first time in a month the morning air was cool through my short sleeves. Looking around at the woods I thought, these trees were probably here in 2008, in 1987, in 1929. Not worried about the Dow. And probably I don’t need to be worried either. Because what a glorious day.

Storm Chasers

Yes, we all know that Minnesotans talk about weather too much, and we also know some of us get a little crazy about it, but here is a profile of the St. Cloud State Storm Chasers club that gives an idea of just how crazy. Although I have to say personally that it sounds like fun.

Preserving land for use and not just postcards

There’s a great post on the Minnesota Land Stewardship Project’s Looncommons blog about the importance of preserving land, not as land to look at but land to be well-used, in this case to grow food near a major metro area. It’s about preserving land as an asset, an asset that can be well used (if well cared for) as opposed to just providing a kind of picturesque relief for people in cities. Author Brian Devore has this right – we are making some progress in our thinking.

Minnesota nice

As we learned in the first few months after we moved up here from Colorado, what the term “Minnesota nice” really means is the smiling but passive aggressive behavior you can get when trying to get help or something else from someone. (At first we thought it just referred to how apparently polite everyone was.)

But the term works because people here really are nice. This weekend we went to a public fireworks display and thought nothing about leaving camping chairs and other belongings sitting out for several hours at the spot where we planned to watch fireworks after it got dark. They are nice camp chairs but obviously nobody would think of stealing them.

A few weeks ago my nephew was visiting from Oregon and after a few days, he asked us, “So what’s the deal with this niceness?” We asked what he meant.

“I mean,” he said, “the first day or so I was confused. I wondered why people were being nice. I thought they were mocking me. Then I realized they were serious, seriously nice. Even college students! Where do college students come from who are nice like this?”