THE OLD MANOF THE MOUNTAIN
THE OLD MAN
Coexisting with all of God's creatures.
Think of the Stalinesque urban residential projects born of noble intentions, and how they ended up fostering and exaggerating the very conditions they were designed to alleviate.
Here in the North Country, on our own modest scale, we have an example of the same thing. A while back my town got aggressive about a leash law. Except for those dog “lovers” whose affection for their animals ended when they booted them out the back door to go terrorize gardeners, bike riders and even pedestrians, it was a good thing. Who needs to be bothered by a strange canine of undeclared intentions when you are taking a walk or even simply tending your own yard?
Unfortunately it did do away with a couple of legends. One was Blast Off, a huge blond Lab across the street, who walked the town from one end to the other. He was a regular at Magoon's Grocery where a bone awaited him every day at the butcher's counter. I can't count the different places I spotted Blast Off.
I always said hello to him, and he always looked at me with that slightly bored look, as in "Who the **** are you?" Never mind, I was proud simply to know the celebrity, whether or not he knew me.
But, now to the Law of Unintended Consequences. Like so many pieces of well-intentioned social legislation, the leash law - which by the way is strictly enforced and widely observed here - had an effect nobody contemplated. In fact, I may be the first person in town to put 2 and 2 together.
My yard and my neighbors have become plagued with woodchucks the last several years. They have built what I liken to a condominium beneath our yards. The main access seems to be underneath my greenhouse, a building with a loose rock foundation and just a crawl space. There is no effective way to get at their burrow without either ripping up the floor or moving the building. From this sanctuary, they have extended their network of tunnels to my neighbor's succulent rock garden... to my pond where they probably seek their liquid refreshment at the end of a hard day... and even under my driveway about 100 feet to the sloped bank in front of my house which looks upon the parking lot behind the high school.
We are beside ourselves, trying to figure out a solution to what seemed our own unique problem. My neighbor launched an aggressive campaign of chemical warfare, uncharacteristic of this gentle woman in her late 80's... she bought everything the farm & garden stores had to offer, and I would not be surprised to learn that she might have subscribed to some soldier-of-fortune magazines in search of heavier armaments.
We have set out any number of humane traps, and I have ferried several woodchucks but many more raccoons to a more suitable environment in a neighboring town. Let them find their way back here from there! But that has barely made a dent in the population. Last summer we had a mother and father woodchuck, and four little ones. At times, we watched them play and even doze off in the sun!
But lately, as my neighbor and I have shared our plight with others in town, it has come to our attention that everyone seems to be suffering from this invasion. And then I thought about the leash law. It surely is nice not having someone else's dog passing through my yard, digging up the flowers and doing his business where I am likely to step... but who would have thought that we had banished the natural enemies of woodchucks, and that within just a few years they would take over?
If we were good social engineers, we could place a bounty on the woodchucks, but that could be dangerous with bounty hunters recklessly seeking their quarry... or we could introduce a "natural" predator, oblivious of the one we had left on his leash, like maybe boa constrictors, wolves or wild boar or something.
For now though, I guess we are going to leave well enough alone. The gardens will not fare so well, an occasional wayward woodchuck will find his way into my trap and win a one-way trip out of town, and we will gnash our teeth... but Fido will stay to home and at least we will not bring down upon ourselves some new and unexpected plague, like starlings, killer bees or walking catfish.
Wait a minute... is that my elderly neighbor dressed in camouflage toting an Uzi?
Bats have always given me the chills. I suspect they are innocent enough creatures, cute even if you got used to them. But they are creepy and mysterious. Once when representing someone with a bat-infested house, I learned that bats supposedly migrate from the North Country to spend the winter in Connecticut, but always return to the same place each spring. They are homebodies and tough to get rid of.
After The Old Man’s divorce, his ex-wife moved across town and bought a nice enough house, but one that turned out to be plagued with bats from time to time. This seemed appropriate. Occasionally after visiting there, my kids would return home with tales of their stepfather taking off after a bat with a badminton racket in the wee hours.
But (and here The Old Man knocks on wood), I have never had bats in my house.
Terrie does most of the painting around here. If I had her energy and her motivation and the time, I might paint as much. As it is, the only qualification I have is that I have some paint.
She, however, does not climb ladders, at least not to much of an elevation. It is on account of this that the house and barn are beginning to look like they have a fresh, wide stripe around the bottom. I don’t mind climbing a ladder and painting up there; in fact, I rather enjoy it. But I need more time to do it.
Earlier today though I had the time, the energy, the motivation and the paint. So I worked on a second floor area next to the sleeping porch. The house is a large Victorian and, while it is not endowed with the crazy rooflines of some Victorians, it does have some interesting features. There is a sloped shed-style roof that comes off the back of the house to shelter the sleeping porch; beneath this there is a small decorative roof across the back that suggests the top of the second story and the bottom of the third. The two converge where the latter butts up against the sleeping porch so as to create a tight angle where the shingles of the latter crowd under the eave of the former.
I knew that it would be difficult to paint this eave without making a mess of things, and so was being quite careful as I dabbed the paint in. At one point I thought I detected some motion in the inner recesses of the angle, and figured I had disturbed a spider. Very slowly the motion became a bit more definite. Eventually I recognized what it was that was attracting my attention. I had roused a bat from his siesta in the darkness created by the shingle. What is more, as he had peeked out (and what did he really expect to see?), I had painted his two pointed little ears and a bit of his blinded brow a bright white!
As I write this, it is evening and the paint is dry. The bats are wheeling around the black skies plucking hapless insects from the air. It is fortunate for the bat whom I met earlier today that his kind are blind, or he might be subject to ridicule. But I wonder whether he is eating as well as he might tonight, as I imagine his prey scattering at the sight of his bright white head breaking out of the darkness.
