ONE GOOSE AT A TIME

FROM PAUL:

Won’t be long now, the geese will arrive, thought I heard some yesterday, but it was only exuberant chickens. Even before there’s any open water on the creek, they’ll be entertaining and serenading me as they crash land, slide and tumble on the ice, to scout out and lay claim to the choicest nesting area. I have to think these are the same geese or offspring that have been raised here over the years. What other reason would geese in their right mind wend their way through the mountains, looking for a beaver dammed creek in a country with huge lakes and two big, designated waterfowl refuges? I’ve always meant to compile statistics...when they first arrive every year and how many pairs start out nesting and how many are successful at raising a brood. I suspect they’re swallow-like and show up every year on or about the same day. 

Even when I’m expecting them, the first wild honks come as a surprise, like they snuck in overnight. Trying to count them is problematic too. If I go out there, it seems they all rise up at once to circle and eye me warily, but that’s deceptive because if they’re sitting eggs, there are still a bunch of geese in the grass and reeds, waiting until you almost step on them before bursting into flight, or come chasing after you with wings outspread and neck crooked forward, offering to take a piece of your hide.

Coyotes and other predators must take a lot of them but it never seems to much reduce the population, nor dampen their enthusiasm. My camera records sound, I ought to see if it’ll pick them up well and figure out how to send you a sound file. I’d like to get another one of the spring peepers and overlay them for a sound track I could use for a spring tonic in mid winter.

Paul is on the plush west side of the Rockies, surrounded by trees, where spring comes early and actually involves things we don’t see until early summer, but here’s something he could listen to if he doesn’t get to that recording project.

http://www.myspace.com/frankielainemusic/music   NO, not “Mule Train!”  “The Cry of the Wild Goose.”  That was my father’s theme song.  In fact, Paul is getting ready for a spring wanderjahr.

Not me.  After the wind blew everything into a tumble, it has snowed again.  Not a lot, so the cats don’t mind trotting out the cat path to inspect the back garage.  

But my winter wool socks are looking very hairy.  I decided early that knots in socks were not a good thing, so I just let the ends of the wool trail.  They don’t show when I have my shoes on in public.  For the same reason, I use up any bits of wool I have around.  I like sock darning.  It’s a pleasant way to keep my hands busy while I listen to the news.

Yesterday on the way back from the post office I picked up some good firewood and there’s lots in my own yard.  The wind is quiet enough to sit by my wood stove and burn sticks this afternoon.  Another pleasant thing to do, though there’s no radio out there.  No matter.  I like hearing the fire.

The other event on the way back from the post office was a Canada goose flying over, yelping, not much higher than the housetops!  Here I was scoffing at Paul.  But the calves and lambs are coming fast now.  And then there was a whole V of geese -- not a long, high one.  I think they were local geese, hatched here, who wintered over in Great Falls where the river is fast enough to stay open.  The real migrators fly way up high, only their voices falling down like rain.

One theory is that these big birds, remnants of dinosaurs, learned to migrate partly in response to seasons and partly because of the continents, borne on deep tectonic plates and driven apart by volcanic upwelling at the bottoms of oceans, kept trying to do what they had always done, even though the terrain changed and so now they are birds.

If you want to get all scared (and put off doing your homework) here’s something to worry about:

“The world can see total havoc if the solar flares continue to bombard the earth. According to some scientists and geologists, the Sun may be experiencing a 100,000 years cycle and bombarding the earth with massive solar wind. While the magnetosphere and earths internal dynamo is holding strong, a serious problem is being observed in the thermal and seismological readings of the earth’s tectonic plates.

“For the first time the tectonic plates of the earth are becoming vulnerable to these abnormal electromagnetic radiation from the Sun.

“There is some risk of the tectonic plates disintegrating by 2012. That will be catastrophic and the human civilization can disappear in a day or two.

“According to some tectonic plate observers, Indo-Australian plate is about to break apart near Sumatra. That will automatically produce ripple effects and many other plates will start cracking.

“The electromagnetic radiation from the Sun and the cosmic radiation jointly are causing major stresses in all fault areas of the tectonic plates. It is similar to making the plates in those weak spots brittle – a little shock of any kind will break them.”

(FROM A BLOG CALLED YEAR-2012)

Paul won’t be surprised:  he’s a “doomer,” raised in the shadow of nuclear holocaust.  Actually, total and instant destruction is not a problem because there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.  But disruption of what one expects and depends upon as daily infrastructure can be a heavy weight, a strong wind, an earthquake.  The realistic problem might be interference with our internet/satellite system or even our electrical grid.

So I keep my socks mended and trek to the post office every day to get my bills and second-hand books.  The windfall of sticks is welcome and if I can’t blog, well, I have a big stack of yellow legal pads.  Not to worry about publishing what I write -- publishing has already cratered.  Apocalypse comes in small increments.  It teaches us to fly.