Author: JLfromNH

Holidays

With the first day of spring looming I always think with amusement about the big holiday. No, not Christmas or Thanksgiving. I mean Groundhog’s Day. It’s more than a little mystifying as to why so much fuss is made about whether or not the woodchuck (…sorry, groundhog…) see his shadow or not. If you count off the number of weeks between February 2nd and the first day of spring , it’s always six weeks. So it doesn’t really matter if he’s got a shadow. The concept of Groundhog day originally came over with German immigrants. I don’t think it was even that big a deal to them but the whole thing got a shot in the arm when the movie starring Bill Murray premiered back in 1993. For whatever reason, holiday starved Americans latched onto the date and now we see men in dated costumes hauling out a bemused woodchuck to the flash of cameras and cheering onlookers.

There are plenty of other holidays both major and minor before the onset of spring. Valentine’s Day is always a big one with the heart themed candy landing on store shelves almost as soon as the Christmas sweets have been cleared away. It’s a safe bet the original Valentine, an ancient Christian saint would be aghast at the commercial hedonism associated with the holiday at one time dedicated to him. Nowadays its Christian origins have been forgotten. Instead we see shelves of greeting cards expressing romantic sentiments as well as boxes of chocolates and assorted gewgaws which get shuffled to the markdown table once February 14th has flown by.

Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday is another holiday celebrated with great abandon the day before Ash Wednesday which oddly enough this year fell on the same day as Valentines. Sometimes called Shrove Tuesday, it’s the last day before Lent and is a time of feasting and carnival (depending of the customs of the country celebrating) before beginning the solemn time of fasting and penance that characterizes Lent. If you watch the shenanigans in New Orleans you will witness wild floats, even wilder costumes and in some areas the ‘custom’ of tossing beaded necklaces to ‘ladies’ in the crowd who have bared certain portions of their anatomy. You’d never know there was a religious background to any of these festivities.

Then of course there is Saint Patrick’s Day. Officially a Christian feast day, it’s as much a celebration of Irish identity as it is the accomplishments of the saint it is named for. Thanks to the diaspora from Ireland back during the Great Famine it nearly became a national holiday with parades, sporting shamrocks and an emphasis on the color green that even involved pouring a vegetable based dye into the Chicago river to turn it the appropriate color for Saint Paddy’s Day. As with all other occasions that have fallen into the hands of the merchants a deluge of t-shirts, trinkets, etc has followed, none of which really has anything to do with the original holiday.

So why holidays? And more to the point how do we get away from the crass commercialism that seems to afflict both major and minor ones? It helps to recall why holidays existed in the first place. The word ‘holiday’ originates from any early English word meaning ‘holy day’. As implied it was a day set aside when no work was done and religious events (Christmas or Easter) were observed. Many religions besides Christianity have holidays. They all served the purpose of promoting social cohesion and allowing a break in the routine of daily life.

Now the meaning of holiday has become conflated with the idea of vacation. Vacation is something that arose with the Industrial Revolution when people began working at jobs that took them away from home and family. Prior to that, it was largely the wealthy that could go on trips or have leisure time. Work not only cut into family life but social life as well. Holidays were a means to counteract this, allowing the maintenance of these important human ties.

The commercialism surrounding the holidays can be easily counteracted by ignoring it. Save yourself some money and get back to the basics of why holidays are really important. It’s been pointed out that the traditions which go with the various holidays reinforce the values we deem important, provide role models for the young and help ground us. Traditions can be good medicine to counteract the chaos we see in the world around us. So decorate the tree for Christmas, shoot off fireworks on the Fourth of July or quietly visit a cemetery on Memorial Day while remembering why these various holidays exist.

Northern Pass: Vox Populi

Many in Northern New Hampshire breathed a great sigh of relief when state regulators rejected the Northern Pass plan last Thursday. On the opposite side of the aisle wails arose from advocates. Eversource expressed its ‘shock and outrage’ over the sinking of their project. Apparently these people didn’t pay the slightest attention to the concerns of locals over the scope of the project and its likely negative long term impacts on New Hampshire. Their chilly indifference to the complaints they heard suggests they regarded the lot of us up here as backward Luddites trying to stand in the way of progress. They ignored repeated requests to completely bury the lines which would have eliminated a good deal of the resistance to Northern Pass.

Eversource will no doubt appeal the decision but for now at least the project is stymied. It remains to be seen if they will learn from their diplomatic errors and try working with locals instead of looking down their noses at them. Probably not. Corporations have never been known for their humanitarian behavior and we can probably expect more of the same from them except for a little more added sugar coating.

The real underlying problem with Northern Pass (and other projects like it), at least as I see it, is the fact these are projects based on the assumption (often unthinking) that petroleum is plentiful and cheap and will always be so. They tout themselves as a ‘clean’ alternative to oil but pull aside the curtain and you will find the same old, same old. Few people really bother to do this and so don’t realize large scale electrical generation in and of itself is simply unsustainable.

To maintain these huge facilities, you need mass quantities of electronics for balancing current load, you need raw materials for the towers, underground cables, wiring, transformers etc, all of which require their own energy inputs to even be mined and shaped into the required parts. Cheap petroleum up until recently made all of this relatively easy. But now things have changed and not for the better.

Much has been made of Peak Oil but less of something that has been called ‘Peak Everything.’ What this refers to is the unpleasant reality that for many decades, we and other industrialized nations have been engaged in a drunken orgy of mining resources as though there were no tomorrow. Instead of carefully and frugally making use of the finite materials Mother Earth doles out to us, we have squandered our mineral heritage. Now slowly but surely the bills are coming due. An audit of what mineral resources the US has and doesn’t have makes for sober reflection.

The idea behind talking about all this is not to make you despondent for the future but to realize that there is a future, just not necessarily the one we dreamed of and got presented to us in glowing images from Star Trek, 2001 Space Odyssey or even the Jetsons. Instead the future coming at us is much smaller, of necessity resource poor and slower paced. But it is livable. To make it livable we need to face reality, lay aside fantasies of endless cornucopias of high-tech goodies, and brodingnagian projects promising energy too cheap to measure. Let’s start building more practical communities that can withstand economic shocks and supply those who come after us with a life they can maintain for themselves and even take pride in.

How will we do it? Well, there’s this little thing called experimentation. Maybe it’s high time we got started. To start with there are:

Food Coops.

Community gardening.

Tool Libraries.

It’s surprising what possibilities there are. Yes, downsizing can be painful at times, but it has to be done. Let’s see what solutions we can come up with.

Winter Cold

Well it’s definitely been a traditional New England Winter with heavy snow and frigid temperatures. After several snow falls over a several week period of 8 inches of snow per storm an arctic blast came in immediately after Christmas plunging night temperatures down to 20 plus degrees below zero Fahrenheit followed by day temperatures making it up to a sullen 10 or so below zero with a brief spike up to zero.

It’s been a while since we have experienced such brutal temperatures here in Northern New England. Twenty below zero cold snaps were a frequent occurrence when I was a kid, usually about two or three times during the course of the winter, particularly in January and February. It was one of those things you just had to put up with. There’s the old joke about the Vermont farmer who lived right at the state border with New Hampshire. When told that surveyors had found his house was actually located on the New Hampshire side of the border, he exclaimed with relief:
“Thank God for that! I don’t think I could have survived another damned Vermont winter.”

The relentless rise of global temperatures has caused a moderation over the past twenty plus years here that makes the twenty below temperatures seem freakish now. It’s not unusual to hear the phrase “record lows” being tossed about over temperatures that once would have evoked an annoyed shrug. Now of course the newest name for what we always called a nor’easter is a bomb cyclone. Apparently nor’easter is too old fashioned now. Bomb cyclone better fits the histrionic climate reports breathlessly read to us by overwrought weathermen & women. But it’s really just the same old storm system, just glitzed up for a new audience.

But after years of living through the weather here in New Hampshire, the changes are unmistakable. Weather on the average is warmer than it has ever been. Storms either come rampaging one after the other or take a leave of absence for weeks at a time. Temperatures gyrate wildly from one extreme to the other. Today the temperature high was 39 above zero (Fahrenheit), compared with single digit below day time temperatures from just over a week ago. These wild oscillations indicate a system that has become destabilized and is trying to find a new equilibrium. Since we are still injecting quantities of carbon dioxide and methane (octane fuel for weather systems) into the atmosphere, there’s no way to know what the new normal will eventually become. There’s always the possibility this is the new normal. We will all have to make the adjustment somehow.

Still, if the surveyors come and tell me that due to an error in measurement, I am actually living in Vermont, I will sigh with relief because it means that I won’t have to go through another one of those damned New Hampshire winters.

Between Fall and Winter

There’s a short span of time starting in early November until the first serious snow flies that isn’t quite fall anymore but isn’t really winter yet either. Technically it’s late autumn but to me autumn is when leaves change color and start floating to the ground creating a bright carpet on the forest floor.

Deciduous foliage has pretty much dropped to the ground by November except for a few that hang tough like the beech trees which cling to their leaves for most of the winter. Now the first tentative snowflakes begin falling but they don’t last long as the weather will often warm back up and melt them. Dry winds can also evaporate the thin layers of snows in a process called sublimation. Any fallen leaves quickly lose their color and become dull brown or even grey. The brilliance that made the autumn season so distinctive is gone.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting until the next snowfall comes that stays for the season (or until the next freak warm spell). Until then, everything seems to be in a sort of limbo, not quite winter, not quite autumn. The seed heads of various flowers such as goldenrod and asters sit quiet and grey, waiting. Many people are tempted to cut them down as eye sores but it’s better to leave them as birds will feed on the seeds as well as any insect larva hibernating in the plant stems. I find the seed heads have their own stark beauty, sometimes more striking than the flower they were formed from.

A wild grape vine established itself several years ago on the bank in front of the house. This past year it finally bore grapes. Unlike the extravagantly large seedless domestic fruit in the grocery store, wild grapes are compact, not much bigger than commercial blueberries. They are edible but the flavor is tart and large seeds take up about two thirds of the fruit. While there are multiple recipes for making wild grape jelly online, there weren’t enough grapes to make it worth picking so I left them for any hungry birds that happen along. Maybe next year when the vines have gotten bigger.

With the leaves gone, it’s now possible to look further into the woods and spot stuff you hadn’t noticed before. When out walking a few weekends ago I caught sight of a good sized white pine that had obviously been growing a while but was previously veiled by summer leaves. Now visible, I snapped this picture of it and dubbed it “Ent standing on head”.

But the thing that marks out this time of year is the avalanche of seed catalogs which start coming a week before Thanksgiving.

Most of them, I will never order from as I have just a few favorites that I regularly buy from; Territorial Seeds and Pinetree Catalog. In addition, the local Food Coop carries High Mowing Organic Seeds. Other stores will carry more conventional brands such as Burpee. The nice thing about the catalogs is that they bring a bright splash of color during this quiet time, making it slightly easier to ignore the lunacy that is the Christmas shopping season currently underway and daydream about my next garden instead.

Have a peaceful Holiday season.

Weird News

Now for something completely different. We humans are an incredibly inventive species. By that I don’t mean we’re great at devising new machines or developing abstruse scientific theories about the universe. I’m talking about our amazing talent for getting ourselves into all sorts of trouble. The Darwin Awards pay tribute to the ability of humans to remove themselves permanently from the gene pool in ways that leave us in profound awe and deeply grateful we didn’t do anything that dumb.

Of course the Darwin Awards only acknowledge those whose actions lead to their premature demise. There are of course numerous incidents of humans performing acts of remarkable blithering idiocy, abominable dumbness and just plain unadulterated mallet-headedness without getting themselves killed in the process. The vast majority of these incidents go mercifully unnoticed but a few manage to make it into the news and leave us scratching our heads in wonder.

First place in my book goes to a nameless individual who made his way into the local news a few decades ago. The event took place in the White Mountain National Forest, in the area known as the Kancamagus Highway. The main draw of this particular strip of highway is the spectacular display of foliage color which occurs in the fall, attracting many tourists to view nature’s beauty. There’s no distracting tourist traps or other eye-sore businesses to mar the scenery. There are a few rest stops for those who need to answer Nature’s call. They are rustic affairs, resembling cabins with toilets that don’t flush but empty instead into cesspits that are cleaned out by a company hired to handle these matters (nice work if you can get it…).

The particular incident I have in mind occurred when a family of tourists was driving through admiring the foliage when their teenage daughter indicated she had to ‘go’. They pulled into the next rest stop where the young lady went into the women’s facility. As she was preparing to make use of the toilet, she happened to look down into it when lo and behold she saw a man was down inside the cesspit looking back up at her. Those of you with teenage daughters can no doubt imagine the reaction this got. The New Hampshire State police were summoned (not local cops as this is a state park) and sure enough there was indeed a real live man down inside the cesspit.

Now, here’s the thing. In order to get him out, they had to call the business that cleans out the pit as the door leading into it was still locked from the outside. Which of course means there was only one way he could have gotten into the cesspit. Yes…

At any rate once the fellow was extracted from the cesspit, the question naturally arose as to why he was down there in the first place. His story went something like this (my apologies to anyone reading this who happens to be gay). He wanted to use the facilities but had heard those salacious stories about men of a certain gender preference who liked to use rest stops for their romantic trysts. Not wanting to be accosted, he retreated to the presumed safety of the ladies rest room. While changing his clothing, he inadvertently dropped his wedding ring down the toilet so there was nothing for it, he just had to go after it. That was his story.

There were several problems with his account. For one thing when the cesspit company did a search, no ring turned up. When the police did a background check on this fellow, not only did they find he was not married, they also found he was already very well known to the Maine police having been nabbed by them on numerous occasions as a habitual window peeper. So in reality our toilet diver was a sex offender (albeit a minor one). So off to jail he went.

The local New Hampshire WMUR news station (actually our only news station) reported at some length on this story, mainly obsessing about how incredible filthy he was when they got him out and how the police had to put plastic coverings in the squad car to protect the seats (I imagine it was a while before they got the car aired out…). Mostly the reporters seemed to be just plain gobsmacked that anyone would do something like this just to get a peek at naked rear ends.

A more recent story popped up in the news that very nearly edged this one out. That involved a lady from Colebrook New Hampshire who with the assistance of some exceptionally dim minions went out in the wee hours of the morning and dug up her father’s grave. Why did she do this? Well, she was searching for the ‘real will’ which she had come to believe was buried with him (along with a bottle of vodka). Happens all the time, right? Apparently she felt she didn’t get what she thought she should have gotten for an inheritance. So there just had to be a ‘real will’ somewhere and it must have been buried with dear old Dad. So that justified the night-time cemetery visit.

It did no good to insist she had done this in a ‘respectful manner’ and her dad would have been ‘ok’ with this. The New Hampshire court system didn’t see it that way and, no surprise, she was sent to prison. These hijinks didn’t quite have the icky-poo quality of the guy in the toilet story but it did achieve a very close second place. However, the toilet diver may yet be shoved into second place as the grave-digging daughter has since gotten herself in trouble again.  As it looks as if the story hasn’t fully played itself out, she may yet outdo herself and win top billing for weird news. Until someone comes along and tops even her….(and someone always will….)


Oh…My…God……

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” – Albert Einstein