June 7, 2007

• my comments on your comments

  Commenting on my redhead entry, daughternaught said, “It is interesting to me how many of the people on your list are also on
  the lists of famous people with autistic traits.  Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Vincent van Gogh, Woody Allen…”  She provided a link to a list, and many of those listed there are redheads that I had left off my list because it was too long as it was.  This doesn’t really come as a big surprise to me.  The autistic spectrum includes ADD and Asperger’s Syndrome, and I know more than a few people with those or other autistic spectrum conditions, many of them redheads.  My son and I both are Awesomely Delightfully Different.

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  On my walk in the woods, Mique commented that, “…we look for similar things, though I dig on rocks any chance I get.”  So do I.  In the woods, I don’t see any rocks because the ground is down there somewhere under many years’ accumulation of moss, leaves, and such.  The forest floor is spongy between the exposed roots and fallen trees.

  Out on the roads, however, there is an ever-changing bonanza of tumbled stones.  New ones turn up when the snowplows and road graders go through.  The gravel used in our roads isn’t rock that was put through a crusher, it is what the glaciers left behind when they receded after the last Ice Age.  Between the rivers and creeks around here, the forest has grown up on ancient eskers and drumlins, but we see only their basic shapes under the vegetation and debris.

  I walk the roads in the rain because the colors of the rocks show better when they are wet.  Some of the more colorful stones include various agates, and jasper of green, red, purple and many shades of yellow, orange and brown, much of it brecchiated.  Jade is there, occasionally some amethyst, and even a few softer stones such as calcite and fluorite.  I love rocks.

  Be_The_Rain wrote:  “do you wear sneakers, not boots?  what about snakes?”

  I don’t know how far north the range of reptiles extends, but at this latitude, 62 degrees, there are no snakes or lizards.  We also have no chiggers, ticks, scorpions, tarantulas or black widow spiders, and our mosquitoes don’t carry the usual tropical diseases associated with them.    There is no poison ivy, poison oak, or poison sumac.

  I know of only one plant with a contact poison:  Oplopanax horridus, devil’s club, is covered with little thorns that raise an itchy rash if touched.  We have hornets, wasps, yellow jackets and the aforementioned mosquitoes, as well as some tiny biting gnats called noseeums.  We have several species of bees, but no native honeybees.

  Coyotes now range this far north, but didn’t until recently.  I hear them sometimes, and have seen a few.  The foxes around here are interesting.  There are red foxes, and arctic silver foxes, and a hybrid race we call cross-foxes that are bigger than either the red or silver species, have bushier tails and widely variable color patterns, often spotted, masked, or with contrasting “socks” and tails.  Many of the dogs in this area are hybrids with wild canids.

  Several readers mentioned the bears.  That part of the woods where I walked yesterday is the same area where the cat Muffin and I heard and smelled a bear a week or two ago.  I had that in mind as I walked along the trail, and I was singing my usual little, “dum de dum,” bear warning song to let any one who happened to be in the area know that I was there.  Some people wear bells for that purpose. 

  I have had several close encounters with black bears.  One chased me onto my porch about fifteen years ago, and might have gotten to me before I got through the door, if I hadn’t picked up a broom to fend it off.  Brown bears, grizzlies, are less numerous, and they tend to stick to the same denning and feeding grounds year after year, making them more predictable than the black ones. 

  

  I know bears can be dangerous.  I’m glad they sleep all winter.  I
  don’t see any point in being afraid.  With experience, I have learned
  what it means to be careful, to take bear precautions, and that is what
  I do.  I took this shot in 1978, up close, no long lens.  I look at this guy’s face now and all I feel is affection.  At the time I captured this image, what I was feeling was intense curiosity.  The story of that day is here, and there are more bear stories, here.

  The chance of an encounter with a bear won’t keep me out of the woods, just as the chance of a wreck won’t keep me off the highway.  What might keep me out of the woods occasionally for the next few weeks or months are the insects.  At some times of day, after rains, when the wind is calm, the gnats and mosquitoes swarm in dense clouds.  The skeeters drill in and suck my blood.  The no-see-ums gnaw tiny holes in my skin and lick up the blood that oozes out.

  

  And that’s not the worst part.  What I really can’t stand is inhaling them, having them down behind my glasses in my eyes, flying into my mouth… *shudder*

  

  • 7:32 pm
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