Category: Environment

Categories
Critters

Small moments

My roommate came home this afternoon and asked when the bush on the corner had been removed. I had just been downstairs and when I looked out the window, the small, sickly bush on the corner of the dirt in front of our place was still there; still stubbornly hanging on, even if the management had taken no care of it this summer. We’d watered it, but it never looked great. The birds like it, though, as well as the squirrels.

I was surprised and said I’d just seen it when I came upstairs. “No, not the small plant. The big one on the side of the building.”

I was suprised, shocked really, and ran downstairs and outside. Where once was a big bush, three formed into one covering the cable box and overlapping the corner, there was now stubs cut low to the ground. It was awful, but what was worse were the few finch standing on the stumps looking bewildered. When I came out they took off, one female flying in circles in confusion before making a beeline for a car and hiding underneath it.

This was the habitat for our finches, those we had been feeding for over a year now. This was their home and their protection from hawks and other predators; their sanctuary. The only reason we felt we could feed the birds was knowing that they had the safe shelter of the bush in case of danger or dog or people walking by.

It was also a sanctuary for the rabbits as they made their way up the lawn from the street below, and provided a dark green accent to the brick of the building — about the only one this summer since the lawns died from the drought.

I came storming into the house and called the management office and asked why they removed the bush. The young woman who answered didn’t know but checked and came online to tell me that the maintenance was ‘removing some of the older, bigger bushes’, why she didn’t know. Maybe there was a paranoid idiot who was afraid of the shadows, because lord knows Americans jump at shadows, and hack and pick at nature until there is nothing left unknown, uncontrolled, and free.

I am ashamed to say I yelled at that young woman, though this is something I rarely do. I am a quiet person by nature, regardless of what you might think from these pages. But I yelled at her. I told her about the generations of finches who had made their home in the bush, and since they had removed the shrubs in front of our place last year, all that’s left now for shelter is the big trees–home to the hawk and the eagle. I yelled at her and said that all they do is cut down and take away.

Later I called to apologize–yes, I apologized. If I were made of the same cement that seems to pass for ‘ground’ in America nowadays, I may not have gotten so upset when I went out and saw the birds unsure of what happened to their home. Perhaps someone got annoyed because the birds shit on their cars. They rarely did, though; they were content to hang around the corner, safe in their bush. When I apologized and tried to explain why I was upset, I could hear the girl think, “they’re only finches”. Common as dirt, small, brown; you never see them unless you really look; or hear them unless you listen.

But this summer I found out that finches are a wonderful little bird–rich with personality and spirit. I could go out on a sunny morning and stand by the door and listen to the birds in the bush, and no matter how sad, feel uplifted by their sound. We had created a living, viable space in this little corner; filled with simple lives and simple sounds. And now it’s gone, and all that’s left is dead stumps and dirt.

Categories
Environment

Double Crescent

It seemed a bit cooler this evening. When the roommate got home with the car, I hauled my butt down to Powder to go for a walk. The air quality is so bad that it appeared as smudges against the sky, with only a bit of true cloud showing through — touched with red gold from a burnt orange blaze of sun in the sky.

At the park, two mothers with their four new babies were frisking about — I wonder how many generations I’ve seen now?

You could smell the green of the trees, and they almost filtered out the acrid sting of the air. I have become more aware of smell lately; when coming back from Branson a century or two ago, I could actually smell rain while driving along with the window down. I remember my nose going into the air as I sniffed the scent, like a bear or a dog. A few minutes later, it started to rain. It was a great smell.

I visited both libraries on the way home from the park and made a good haul on books — my first Clive Cussler, and a couple of history books as well as an old and familiar Anne McCaffrey. When heading back to my car from the city library, I looked up in the sky at the crescent moon, colored rust-gold. Instead of one moon, though, there were two: the original and a faint replica in front of it. Somehow the thick air had created a light shadow of the moon against the dark sky. Is this a premonition? What does a double crescent moon mean?

At home I unloaded groceries from the store and stepped out to pick up my books from the car when a yellow truck with blinking white and yellow lights started coming down our street, spraying all the trees and bushes for mosquitoes. I ducked back inside to avoid the dousing, only venturing out again when the mist had settled.

If I can see a double moon, I have to wonder at the wisdom of shooting yet more toxins into the air. I hadn’t heard anything about an outbreak of West Nile. After I grabbed the books, I did what all good internet children do–came inside and searched on St. Louis and West Nile. I found one suspected death and one confirmed West Nile illness in the last month in the St. Louis area. I wonder, though, how many more people were affected by breathing air thick enough to bounce the image of the moon back at itself?

Categories
Climate Change History Weather

A will and a big water

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In 1927, the rain kept falling in the Mississippi delta. Folks would look at the sky anxiously, hoping for a break, but none came. Those who lived near the Mississippi, well they knew he was a cantankerous old bastard and could turn on they any old time. They’d watch the levees, those mounds of dirt and tough old swamp grass that was all that stood between them and the waters.

Most years, the levees held and the rich, wet lands yielded plentiful crops–usually cotton, though some land owners ran sugar cane. The folks that farmed the lands were black, but they didn’t own the lands, no sir. No they were sharecroppers, which back in those days was only about a drop of blood away from slavery.

Then early that year, a wall of water came down south, riding the Sip like a drunk-happy gambling boat captain. It started in Illinois, where those in charge, the Mississippi River Commission pointed to their work, their levees and said without a doubt they’d hold. Then right before Easter, the levees gave up their fight and started to fail, one after another.

“On that night that the levee broke, when daddy went out and he could see the water coming across the fields. And our house was about, I guess about eighteen inches off the ground. And he come back in the house, he says, “”I see the water coming across the field. It done filled up a big slew coming between our house and the levee,” and it’s level out there. So he come back in the house and stayed about twenty minutes. About 10: 00 that night, we were moving a few bed things up in the loft part of the house, and there’s where we was until the next morning. And we stayed in there, up there, two nights and three days. Finally a seaplane come along, and my daddy had done cut a hole where we could look out on the outside, and he was waving a white rag when that seaplane come by. And then about two hours after then, it was a gas boat going up there and taking us all to the levee. And we lived up there on the levee until the water went down.”

 

William Cobb On the Night when the Levee Broke

In Greenville, Mississippi over 13,000 blacks are stranded on the levee without food and water and little protection from the elements. When boats arrive to rescue those flooded out, only the whites are picked up, because the plantation owners in the area are worried that if the blacks are ferried out, they won’t return to farm the land.

Will Percy decides that the only honorable and decent course of action is to evacuate the refugees to safer ground down river and arranges for barges to pick up and transport the refugees. Many people are reluctant to abandon Greenville, despite the fact that their homes have been submerged. The planters, in particular, oppose Will’s plan, fearing that if the African American refugees leave, they will never return, and there will be no labor to work the crops. LeRoy (ed. note: Will Percy’s father), placing his business interests above his family’s tradition of aiding those less fortunate, betrays his son and secretly sides with the planters. Boats with room for all the refugees arrive, but only 33 white women and children are allowed to board. The African American refugees are left behind, trapped on the levee. Later, Will Percy will write that he was “astounded and horrified” by this turn of events.

To justify his relief committee’s failure to evacuate the refugees, Will Percy convinces the Red Cross to make Greenville a distribution center, with the African Americans providing the labor. Red Cross relief provisions arrive in Greenville, but the best provisions go to the whites in town. Only African Americans wearing tags around their necks marked “laborer” receive rations. National Guard is called in to patrol the refugee camps in Greenville. Word filters out of the camps that guardsmen are robbing, assaulting, raping and even murdering African Americans held on the levee.

From: PBS A Fatal Flood

The flood waters covered over over 27,000 square miles across several states, Mississippi and Arkansas being hardest hit. Over 240 are known to have died, but record keeping was poor in those times.

“Back up to a house . . . there was seven people on it. I presume it was wife . . . man, his wife, and five children. And I was heading over to this house. This was on my first hauling, the next day after the levee broke. And on the way getting to the house—this house was just moving along [in the river], you know—and all of a sudden it must of hit a stump or something. And the house flew all to pieces. And I searched the boards and things around there for ten minutes, and you know I never saw a soulÌs hand come up, not a soul.”

Henry Caillouet Seven All Together Went Down

The flood lasted two months, and the folks in New Orleans had actually dynamited a levee before the city–an act that proved unnecessary because broken levees elsewhere along the Sip had spilled enough water so the river wasn’t a threat to the city.

By the time it was over, 700,000 people had lost their homes, and a hundred thousand homes and businesses were destroyed. The costs of the flood topped 4 billion dollars by 1993 standard’s–a comparison brought to mind because in 1993, another great flood hit, but this time further north in Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. I remember talking to a man in an old lighthouse on the hill overlooking Hannibal, Missouri about the day when the waters began to rise. He was a simple man who liked to talk with people, becoming an unofficial greeter to those visiting the lighthouse.

“You see there”, he pointed out at the far shore of the Mississippi. “The water came from that direction. It just kept rising and rising, and it came toward the town, like a great, slow moving wave.”

He then pointed at the bridge that spanned the River.

“There was another bridge here during the flood. I watched as people tried to get across the bridge, to get to their families and homes before they were cut off from the waters.” I remember him smiling, raising his red feedcap (of which he was very proud), to resettle back on his head. “I watched as they blowed it up to make way for the new bridge.”

When the floods washed out the approaches to the bridge, people had to commute from one side to the other of the river either by plane, or driving 200 miles away. Hannibal was underwater for 147 days before the flood began to recede; some towns were under even longer. Even St. Louis had flood waters lapping at the heels of the Arch, and flowing down the normally dry Des Peres river into the city and into the neighborhoods only a block or two from where I live now.

The 1993 flood displaced 74,000 people, and destroyed 45,000 buildings and homes. It’s cost was 7.5 billion.

Today, the most significant sign you see of the flood of 1927 is the number of blacks living in northern cities. After the flood, many left the delta area, either because they lost their homes, or because of their harsh treatment; most likely because of the harsh treatment. There is some irony in this mistreatment of blacks, and the fears on the part of the white landowners about losing their workers. I think if the blacks had been treated decently, many wouldn’t have left, thereby hastening the final curtain call for the old southern plantation culture.

And when the blacks left, they took with them part of the southern culture, manifested in the blues that followed every where they went: Chicago, Seattle, New York, and points beyond. Some would even say that the 1927 flood was the birth of the blues, such as this When the Levees Break, recorded by Kansas Joe, recorded in 1929.

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay

Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan
Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan
Thinkin’ ’bout my baby and my happy home

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And all these people have no place to stay

Now look here mama what am I to do
Now look here mama what am I to do
I ain’t got nobody to tell my troubles to

I works on the levee mama both night and day
I works on the levee mama both night and day
I ain’t got nobody, keep the water away

Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good
Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to lose

I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works so hard, to keep the water away

I had a woman, she wouldn’t do for me
I had a woman, she wouldn’t do for me
I’m goin’ back to my used to be

I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan
I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan
Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home.

The flood was also responsible, in part, for some of the success of the Civil Rights movement later in the 1960’s. Whites in the north, and even parts of the south, came face to face with the atrocities committed on blacks in the delta. And blacks found that they were no longer willing to be free in name only.

You also don’t see any of the damage from the 1993 flood, though again you see signs of it everywhere. At the restored Hodgson Mill, there was a pencil scratch half way up the second floor of the mill that marked the highest level of the flood. Most of the towns at risk along the Sip have also installed high floodgates, painted or not dependent on the town. The government also bought out flood-prone farms and made many into parks and conservation land.

When floods happen, people move, but when the waters recede some return, while others move in. Life goes on, because flooding, no matter how tragic the losses, is a part of life. It is a part of the delta, a legacy and a price for living by the river.

Right now, the delta is being hit again, but this time it isn’t Old Man River who is to blame. Lots of stories about this new flood, too; lots of cries of doom and destruction: Thousands are dead, exclaims the mayor, even while he has people on roofs listening in on radio;Katrina leaves a trail of death and destruction, says the papers, even while people desperately hope for a green cot in a dome in another city; The Mississippi coast is gone, says the governor, even as people pick through rubble and find a single shoe. The recovery will take years, says the President, even as the finger pointing and blaming has begun. Stories about looters and havoc and ruin and how nothing will be the same again.

The city is destroyed. Well, now, I take exception to that one. You can’t destroy a city unless you kill off every last one of the people who live in and love the city. You would also have to remove every reference to it in history, and all of its culture, and every last bit of influence it has ever had in the past, present, and we presume, future.

But I do not intend to give up easily. Why? Because I am absolutely convinced that New Orleanians will not allow their city to become a ghost town. And I intend to be part of the renewal that springs from this determination.
…
The culture of New Orleans has long since factored disasters and general uncertainty into its economic and philosophical outlook. An early-19th-century cholera epidemic killed one out of five New Orleanians, the equivalent of 100,000 today. Even the gravediggers died, forcing people to pile bodies at the cemetery gates. The first owner of the Lombard Plantation was among those who succumbed. But his wife and family stayed on, and some of their descendants, both white and black, are still in New Orleans today, perhaps perched on their rooftop awaiting rescue or huddling gratefully with friends out in Lafayette or Breaux Bridge.

I expect they, too, will return, and that life in New Orleans will go on, with all its precariousness and sense of fragility and, yes, with all its relish for the moment. That relish, by the way, which arose from the constant awareness of precisely such disasters as we are experiencing today, accounts for much of what gives the people of that city their reckless abandon, their devil-may-care attitude, and their zest for life. Rebuilding after Katrina will be just the next in a long series of events in which that spirit has been manifested.

S. Frederick Starr in A Sad Day, too, for Architecture.

Here’s a prediction: come March, 2006, with our help, the towns along the coast will rebuild. A home will replace rubble, and a church will open its doors again. With our care, the bodies will be buried, and those who have suffered loss will be comforted. With our force, we will overcome those who grab gun and seek to cause fear (and in the process find that the ‘gangs’ become ‘groups’ and the groups are fewer than our lurid speculations imply). With our support, the casinos and businesses along the coast of Mississippi will be in full swing, and folks will be back at work. And with our hard work and sacrifice, the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans will be the best. Ever.

The city is destroyed. What foolish nonsense. You know, the people that wrote this, they really don’t know the South, and the people who live by big water.

Categories
Critters

My cat, the little princess

Been a long time since I did a shaggy cat story.

You all know Zoë, my cat. My little princess. My sweet faced little adorable furball. My lovely little, silver-haired darling.

Otherwise known as “The Bitch”.

Zoë is a bird friendly cat, which means that she stays indoors at all times. We have a large, carpeted cat tree in front of the window, as well as several rubber mats that she can claw to her heart’s content. She gets quality ‘bird’ (chasing feather on string), ‘keep away’ (playing hide n’ seek throughout the house), and ‘earthquake’ (shaking the tree or chair while she’s on them, which she loves) time, not to mention the ‘under the blanket monster’, the ’stair climb’, and the Lap.

 

She gets a mix of healthy dry food, formulated for both her teeth and her advancing years, as well as a dollop of wet food in the morning and evening (and treats at noon and before bed). She’s amazingly healthy, happy, active, and I think quite a looker. She’s the most beautiful cat I’ve owned, and with a loving, curious, playful personality.

And she has claws. She has, probably, the world’s longest cat claws.

 

At the vets, they look on in horror at those claws, as they leave gouges in the hard surface of the examining table. “Oh my!”, they exclaim, as they quickly reach for the ‘huggy’ to wrap her in before doing an examination. I’ve finally figured out that the most junior person in the office is the one delegated to hold Zoe while she gets her shot. I sure as heck don’t hold her.

We also try to clip her claws, with varying degrees of success. Varying, that is, from poor to “I’m ripped to shreds, and only clipped on claw and I need a transfusion”. The roommate and I hesitate to try again as we don’t want to cut into the quick and cause Zoë to bleed.

(Loosely translated: “The roomie and I are cowards.”)

Now, it’s not unusual for an indoor cat to have long claws, and long claws don’t necessarily mean that there’s a problem (other than they can hook into carpets and get yanked out). But Zoë also has a habit of extending her claws and gently inserting them into whatever is closest. Usually us.

When I’m working in my chair, and her butt is half over my TiBook, her front paws are extended, oh so sweetly, over my leg, claws lightly sunk in. And then she’ll slightly flex them in tune to her purrs, sending tiny little pinpricks of exquisite agony into my skin. My roommate’s arms are a mass of scars from all the play time. I am luckier in that she doesn’t claw me during play time because I’m Mom; roomie is just the hairless, idiot, older brother and therefore fair game.

 

If she’s on my lap, though, and something startles her, she uses her claws to obtain traction in order to launch herself off –accompanied by my screams of anguish, which I think has the neighbor really confused about our lifestyle. (Especially if he gets a closer look at roomie’s arms.)

I have gotten fairly adept at sensing her tensed muscles and quickly grabbing her front claws in order to preserve what’s left of my legs. I am not always successful, and my knees have a series of little red dots all over them, accompanied by thinner red lines of old markings. Last week, though, was the corker. Last week, she sunk her claws in so deep, she punctured a blood vein and now I have this massive dark purple bruise on my leg, with this tiny little pinprick in the middle.

 

Zoë cleaning my blood from claws.

I am mad at her. I am so mad at her. When she isn’t snuggled up into the crook of my arm, head back against my chest, looking up at my face with absolute and unconditional love, I’m really going to be so pissed.

The little Bitch.

 

Categories
Connecting Critters

Seeking our inner anger

I was in a conversation recently about reading sites we know are guaranteed to make us angry. I was reminded of this tonight, when for the second time in a row, I went to this weblog of a woman who could probably find a way to say “Good Morning” and be infuriating. At least to me.

We have nothing we agree on. We could never agree–the differences between us go to the very core of us. More than that, though, there is no open avenue to have any form of effective communication. The most I could ever get from reading her site is frustrated outrage and anger.

So why did I go back a second time?

Why do we continue to read people’s weblog if they make us angry? More, why do we read people we have no respect for? If you have no respect for me, why do you continue to read me? I always assume that the one thing those who read my site have in common is that you respect me, in some small way. You may not agree with me. You may disagree often. You may not like me. But there’s something besides loathing and anger. Or why read me?

Reminds me: We had a black cat that lived in the apartment a couple of doors down from us. It’s owners would let it out to walk around, and it would immediately head for our window. We would call out “Cat, Zoë!” and she would run to the window as fast as she could. She would start hissing and growling and puffing our her fur, and the black cat would hiss and growl and puff out his fur and then they would swat at each other in the window. Not many times, just a couple. Then the black cat would go away, Zoë straining as hard as she could to watch him go.

When his family moved away, she was depressed for weeks.