Category: Local

More Turkey?

A week after Thanksgiving, it’s pretty certain everyone is more than satiated with every possible dish one can think of to make use of leftover turkey meat with. Since I didn’t have company visit this year, the leftovers were the result of a pair of turkey thighs, rather than the whole bird, making it easier to polish them off.

A few days after the holiday kickoff, a small flock of wild turkeys came strolling up my driveway and into the small patch of woods in back of the house. Wild turkeys are surprisingly large, leaving prints behind very reminiscent of dinosaur tracks.

Given that the height of the Thanksgiving feast involves a native American bird, one can’t help wondering why it is called a turkey instead of whatever the First Nation peoples called them. It turns out that invading Europeans tended to name anything they came across after something they were already familiar with in their homeland. One good example is corn. The word corn originally applied to wheat or any other cereal grains. Maize by the way is not really a name from any of the First Nations but has its origins in Spanish. Each local ethnic group had their own name for this staple of life.

As for the turkey, this name was actually applied to a different bird, the guinea fowl. Originally from Africa, it was brought to Europe via the Ottoman Empire (which included the present day Turkey) and was referred to as turkey cocks or hens (depending on gender) because of that. Since the bird from North America superficially resembled the guinea fowl, it came to be referred to as a turkey as well. Because it had a better flavor than the guinea fowl, the American ‘turkey’ supplanted it on many tables and eventually became the centerpiece for our current Thanksgiving celebration.

This past year must have been a good one for wild turkeys as their numbers (based on the size of the flocks I have seen) really jumped. The current turkeys are not really native to New Hampshire. The original turkeys we had disappeared from the state 150 years ago because of habitat destruction and overhunting. Reintroduced in the 1970’s using birds from the Mid Atlantic states their population quickly boomed, helped along by an increasingly mild climate as well as a supply of well stocked bird feeders. Now they are a common sight throughout New Hampshire.

I always get a chuckle when I see wild turkeys. There’s just something so goofy looking about them. But while turkeys have a reputation for being stupid, that’s more likely true of the over-bred domestic varieties. The wild turkey is sharp-eyed and canny, necessary traits for surviving in the forest, where they are often on the menu of hungry foxes, coyotes and other critters.

The mothers carefully shepherd their offspring about. In early summer the chicks resemble fuzzy little footballs. By midsummer they have grown and feathered out enough so they can briefly get air-born for about five seconds or so when they flap their wings. Because factory farm turkeys are so heavily bred for size, many can barely walk much less fly, so it can be surprising to discover that wild turkeys can not only fly but do so very well.

By summers end, they are nearly full grown and can often be seen along with their mothers teaming up with other turkey hens, forming sizable flocks. The males seem to congregate in their own flocks as I have often seen groups of turkeys consisting almost entirely of males.

There’s an old belief that Benjamin Franklin wanted the wild turkey rather than the bald eagle to be the national bird. This is actually a culture myth. It seems Mr. Franklin didn’t feel the eagle was the best representative of American character. In fact he thought the eagle was a bit of a coward and believed the turkey was more courageous than the bald eagle. But there is no indication he wanted the turkey to be the national bird.

In any case, the turkey today is a welcome addition to the local wildlife and I hope will continue to stroll by my house from time to time to give me a good chuckle.

How the year flies by

It’s hard to believe but we are on the doorstep to November with the time change (fall back) just a weekend away. It seems the older I get, the faster time seems to slip past. At the beginning of this last winter, we got hit with a cold spell in January that rivaled the ones I remember from a kid. Twenty below zero (Fahrenheit) at night and barely reaching zero during the day. Cold enough to make the car battery seize up and the fuel line to the furnace ice over requiring the services of a plumbing firm to thaw things out.

Wind storms came and went, finally taking out a dead pine near Big Rock.

Thankfully spring arrived, a bit drier than usual but pretty much on time.

Memorial Day came and went, the weather cooperating enough to allow the usual Memorial Day parade starting at the local firehouse just down the road from where I live and continuing up downtown Main Street.

The holiday is a signal for serious gardening to commence so I made my usual planting in my raised beds of a few vegetables with what I hoped was suitable protection against the usual offenders (deer and woodchucks).

Alas, the local woodchuck (a female) produced a hungry litter that proved small enough to squeeze through the fencing to feast on the growing wax beans. I belatedly reinforced the fencing and was able to coax the surviving plants to produce a few beans for the dinner table.

Summer proved meltingly hot this year with humidity levels appropriate more for the tropics than Northern New England. Rain came in fierce torrents at widely scattered intervals, making it hard to keep the raised beds moist. In spite of the unstable weather conditions, I was pleased to see more bees than I had seen last year. Also a pair of wood thrushes collected nesting material from the back yard and took up residence in the woods, the male’s sweet gurgling song floating through the trees, something I hadn’t heard in quite some time.

Finally something else I haven’t seen in well over a decade, monarch butterflies came migrating through in late August. It’s easy to read encouraging omens in this, that somehow Mother Nature is still managing to hang on in spite of all the damage careless humans seem determined to cause. But we are not out of the woods by any means and need to continue our efforts to support Her. I am down by one composter but have adjusted by snipping weeds rather than yanking them up, adding to the mulch in the gardens. Weather permitting, leaves will be raked up and after filling up the remaining composter will be scattered beneath the trees, allowing nutrients to return to the soil to support the next generation of bees, wood thrushes, monarch butterflies and, yes, baby woodchucks and hungry deer.

Old War Stories From The Hospital

My late mother worked for a number of years at the local hospital before rheumatoid arthritis finally side-lined her. Before that she often brought home tales of things she had encountered in the hospital, going into a fair amount of detail. The result of that has been my possessing a relative immunity to gross-out stories. Another result is a better appreciation of the difficulties of caring for patients and resolving to be a good one myself if and when the occasion arises. (Reality check: Well, I like to think so but probably not).

Her stories covered a wide range from the absurd to the tragic. She often recalled with amusement of the little boy (perhaps three or four), hospitalized for some ailment. He didn’t like where he was, didn’t like the nurses and especially didn’t like what they were doing to him. His favorite tactic (though probably not very effective) was to stand up in bed and threaten to pee on the nurses if they came near. Another story was the birth of a baby boy to a couple who had been long childless. It was generally agreed among the nurses that this was one of the homeliest babies they had ever seen. They nick-named him Mister Magoo because of his resemblance to the cartoon character. But as far as the delighted parents were concerned, he was absolutely beautiful.


Long ago our local hospital was the go-to place for mothers in labor from a number of the surrounding towns. One winter day a laboring mother was being driven frantically by her husband (this was before 911) when control of the car was lost and they wound up ejected into a snow bank. This saved them from being critically injured as this was in the days before seatbelts were mandated. The ambulance duly rescued them and brought the couple to the hospital. However it was then discovered the mother was no longer in labor for the simple reason that she had given birth. Where was the baby? This entailed an even more frantic drive back to the accident scene where the baby was found thankfully unharmed though a bit chilled in the snow bank. Delivery by auto-ejection.

One day my mother came onto her shift and noticed a new patient in one of the rooms, a man with his arm in a sling looking very, very glum. According to the other nurses, this particular gentleman had been partaking of the copious refreshments at the local Elks club which has a very well supplied bar. He became so intoxicated that he fell off his bar stool and in doing so, broke his wrist rather badly. He was immediately rushed up to the hospital. A problem arose after he arrived there, as he was convinced his injury was non-existent. He proceeded to demonstrate his wellness by flapping his hand back and forth, much to the horror of the nurses who could hear the broken bones in his wrist going *crunch*crunchety*crunch***! He was truly feeling no pain, a situation that corrected itself once he sobered up.

More bizarre was the patient who was brought in for frost-bite to his feet. He was an avid mountain climber who had over-estimated his endurance to cold. While he kept all his toes, his heavily callused feet soon showed the effect of the frost bite. The calluses began sloughing off in huge disgusting chunks, some quite thick. Apparently during the summer, this guy often walked barefoot, before it was fashionable to do so, building up quite a layer of calluses as a result. After this rather gruesome process had completed itself, it was discovered that underneath the skin was pink and healthy. It was theorized that because of their thickness the calluses had insulated his feet and kept the frostbite from being worse than it was. Nowadays we obsess about having soft smooth skin on our feet, fretting about the least little corn or callus we develop, forgetting that for countless ages we walked barefoot and got around just fine.

Because it was a hospital, tragedy was never far off. The most dramatic event that happened when my mother was still working was the derailment of one of the trains at the Cog Railroad back in 1967, when 8 people were killed and over 74 injured. The flood of patients that poured in severely tested the skills of the hospital staff. This was at a time before the modern day emergency medical training programs became a recognized specialty taken for granted today. Still the doctors and nurses rose to the challenge. My mother’s shift was usually 3:00 to 11:00 PM but because of the situation she worked straight through until the morning. It was something she always remembered for a long time afterwards with a sense of accomplishment.

It was in the late seventies (78 or 79) that she finally had to quit work due to her arthritis. In her later years there was one patient she helped care for just before she left who she always wondered about. A young man, a tourist up for the skiing, was brought in by a friend. He was very ill but the doctors were having difficulty diagnosing what was wrong with him. Although it wasn’t too openly talked about, it was understood by the nurses that both men were gay. Since the doctors were having no luck treating the young man, unable to even pin down what he was ill from, he was shipped down to a hospital in Boston, his eventual fate unknown. The question that was always on my mother’s mind was this a case of AIDS?

Since the first recognized cases of the disease in the gay population were noted in medical literature in June of 1981, it’s entirely possible AIDS was the source of this patient’s illness. Since 1981 was the year it was officially recognized, there were almost certainly early cases that came and went, the patients dying without it being suspected what was ailing them.

My mother had originally gone to nursing school before she was married but had to discontinue it, when her mother died suddenly and she returned home to assist her father in raising her other siblings. She subsequently returned to Littleton but met and married my father without picking up where she had left off in her nursing education. It wasn’t until after the stress of a hysterectomy and dealing with a mentally ill son that she finally went back to nursing as a way to cope and return to something that had been a dream of hers. She made many friends, both nurses and former patients and had many good memories about her nursing work. Oddly when I went looking for a picture of her in her nursing uniform (complete with little white hat) there was none to be found. She evidently never got around to posing for one. But I think the picture below captures her spirit well enough. Thanks Mom.

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.