Gallery

Foxy

In the Pink

Neighbours
See Red Over
Pink House
By Jackie Atkins

[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

Cape May, New Jersey

When I attended Jeanne d'Arc Camp in Quebec Province, the last thing on my mind was feng shui.Even if I knew then what it was. Indeed adherence to a false and foreign philosophy was a sure way to get me into hell, that and cavorting with the boys across the lake at Camp Don Bosco.

At the age of ten neither prospect tempted me and the nuns made sure to keep me busy and not be lured down Satan’s path.

Besides horseback riding, learning crafts took up most of my time, that and feigning illness before daily vespers, I became adept at the arts of Indian beadings and story telling.

A-hunting We Will Go....

Gallery



Cubbing Saturday, 24.xi.12
Chester County, near Kennett Square
The Cheshire Landowners

The Outer Banks

A Peaceful Way to the Old North State

By Justin T. Carreño
[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

On a hot weekend earlier this month, I set out to reach North Carolina’s northernmost border of its outer banks. By land, the only way is through some of Virginia’s most remote littoral wilderness, and one of the most pristine and natural areas on the eastern seaboard -- False Cape State Park. This is a one-mile- by-10 mile barrier spit of land in southern Virginia Beach, Virginia, sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the back bay of Currituck Sound.

False Cape is the least visited of Virginia’s state parks. It’s isolated, located on the other side of the Back Bay Wildlife Refuge with access only by hiking 4.5 miles down the beach from the town of Sandbridge; by the Back Bay interior trails; or by paddling the bay in a canoe, kayak, or other non-motorized watercraft. This is to protect the seclusion of the wildlife refuge, where shorebirds nest, and all kinds of animals find their homes.

Live free... break your chains of confinement.... go forth and embrace nature and cherish the moment.... dive into your life with no fear....don't hold back, have fun and see everything you can when you're exploring in the great outdoors. ~ Unknown. 

Habitats in Back Bay include beach, dunes, woodland, farm fields, and marsh. The majority of refuge marshlands are on islands contained within the waters of Back Bay. Thousands of geese, swans, and ducks visit the refuge during the migration in late Fall. Other wildlife live here too like loggerhead sea turtles, fox, white-tailed deer, feral hogs, peregrine falcons, egrets, bald eagles, and, at one point, wild horses.

A park ranger told me that the horse herd, now numbering about 120 horses, originally was limited to an area near Carolla, North Carolina, the town just south of the Virginia/North Carolina state line. However, the herd outgrew its range and, increasingly, became determined to become Virginians. The horses migrated northward to False Cape further into the town of Sandbridge. Finally, they became a nuisance to the residents, grazing in yards, galloping down roads, foaling in public parks, and even some lethaly colliding with vehicles. The state couldn’t ignore the problem any longer, and had the Virginia Wild Horse Rescue round up half the herd where it's now protected on farms. The other half of the herd largely keeps to itself, south of the border in North Carolina.

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it. ~ Russell Baker.

I arrived at about 8:30 am, entering the wildlife refuge by making my way to the park entrance. I brought hiking gear, biking gear, and plenty of food and water for the day, and a bit extra in the case of an unplanned overnight.All I had was my road bike, and I was unsure if it would be suitable for the trail, but I thought I would attempt riding the trail to avoid hiking the twenty miles out-and-back. I packed my backpack to include food, water, bug spray, extra clothes, swimsuit, literature about the park, and hiking shoes. I tightened the strap on my GPS watch, mounted my bike, and took off down the gravelly trail in what were now temperatures already in the mid-to-high 80’s. I knew this was going to be tough going with those temps, but with the ocean as my destination, it gave me great incentive to keep going so I could dive in, cool down, and enjoy a hard day’s work.

Andrew Hamilton Reports....

Letter from Trinity Center, California
Playing Chicken

Richard,
You Rittenhouse Square co-op guys might not have noticed, but out here in the suburbs, the exurbs, and in the remote mountain hermit shacks we build chicken coops and raise chickens.

Last spring I joined the Chicken Revolution and made a chicken coop out of the old outhouse, took pictures all along, and I was thinking of making a web-site to send a link to BackyardChickens.com.

If you remember, the last time we talked I was coming back from a vin-ordinaire tour of Normandy that ran through Easter. At the San Francisco airport I got an e-mail from my neighbor who was collecting the eggs, reporting that the bear had come on Easter night and eaten all the chickens.

The rooster, Louis, survived the first night, and another neighbor heard about it and came by and set up a remotely-triggered wildlife camera to get pictures of the bear when he came back to eat Louis. Given a choice of neighbors, I would have preferred one that would catch the rooster and keep him in the garage until I got back, but the bear pictures are a reasonable consolation prize.

So here are the bear pictures. That's a big bear, for this neighborhood. The old outhouse is five and a half feet high at the back end and 44 inches wide. Hope he enjoyed the damn chickens.

Next dispatch I will explain the new electric bear-deterrent devices, and going to the gun store to get a new gun in case I have to shoot this guy. I sold my deer rifle about fifteen years ago, never having shot a deer with it and having realized that I didn't want to shoot things all that much.

Have you been in a gun store lately? It's gotten to be almost as bad as going into a music store, a bunch of guys hanging around disapproving of your qualifications for picking up an instrument. Most of the merchandise is military-style stuff designed to deal with whatever Obama is bringing down on our heads, plus the Arabs. It's hard to find a bear gun, it's just a bunch of weird fat guys in camo standing around talking about high-capacity magazines and laser sights and pistol grips for their post-apocalypse weapons. Back in the day it was the same fat guys, but at least they were talking about shooting animals and about recipes for squirrel burgoo, and a white guy was assumed to be a descendant of Minutemen. The only real difference is that the gun manufacturers must be getting insane rich.

Anyway, here are the bear pix. That's my rooster Louis that he's fixing on eating, if he can pound on the top of the coop long enough to get Louis to run down to the bottom where he can grab him.

Andrew

Letter from Philadelphia
R.I.P. Thelma

Andrew,
Remember, I used to live on a fifty-acre spread in northeastern Connecticut. Back then, the Carreño-ettes got it into their heads that they were going into the egg business -- on my dime. OK, I'd buy the laying hens (chicks), they'd raise them in a coop I built near the barn, and they'd sell their farm-resh eggs at school. (The teachers were eager buyers).

The hens went alayin', and all was well. Particularly with Thelma, from whom we sometimes were able to extract two eggs in one day.

Then came Mr Fox. One, two hens down.

I secured the coop.

Another hen gone. Finally, Thelma got nailed.

So much for the kids' egg business.

But Mr Fox finally got his. I found his entrails one day. Dogs, probably.

Anyway, never met a fox I liked. Why these anti-foxhunters whinge, I'll never know.

Richard

Letter from Sete, France

Oops, am I missing anything?
Off with his Head!
By Andrew Hamilton
Junto Senior Staff Reporter Bio

Sete, France
I've been in Sète going on three months. Been using up all my textual ruminations in e-mail exchanges with the old ladies who went to an old school of mine when I lived in Paris. I take the TGV to Paris next Sunday, stay three nights, and catch a flight to San Francisco on Wednesday.

I haven't been doing much. Swimming in the Mediterranean on the few sunny days and trying to avoid going to the same restaurant twice.

I did get a haircut, and talked about politics with the barber. He asked what I thought of Obama and I told him I waited 40 years, and I'm sticking with him. I asked him what he thought of Sarkozy, and together we concluded that Obama is better. Sarkozy's approval ratings are down in the 30s, and were never of any account in the south. This région went almost entirely Socialist in the elections a couple months ago. The only region with a majority for Sarko's party was Alsace, which is practically Germany.

At the pizza shop yesterday, another customer buying six pizzas said something to me, and I said I didn't understand. He told me something uproarious about cutting a head off, and everybody was howling like hyenas. After the other customers left, I asked the pizza cook what they were talking about and he said that it was the anniversary of cutting the king's head off, and since I was English that was the funniest thing ever. I asked if it was Louis XVI and he said yes, and I'm still wondering why telling an Englishman about decapitating a French king is so hilarious. These are a mysterious people in their humor (By the way, I'm an American).

The pizza cook wanted to know about southern-France style wildfires in California, and he knew that the Terminator is governor. I gave as my excuse for being in Sète that I was looking for a place to live, but that the language is a problem because I can't speak French so well. He said yeah but that I do OK in 'the ensemble,' which was encouraging. I explained that understanding was the problem, and he said, of course you can't understand us, we are sètois. The people of Sète are proud of the incomprehensibility of their lingo.

I had the 'Royale': ham, mushroom, and cheese. Best pizza yet, by far. I'm going to go back next week and get the merguez and poivron. By the way was that Louis XVI Royale?

Sète is Georges Brassens' home town. Paul Valéry, too. But Georges is the one they name everything after. There is a music-hall on the other side of the Pont de Pierre called "Les Amis de Georges", subtitled "Brassens chanté par ses amis." Being a friend of Georges is like being, I don't know, a Kentucky colonel or a Daughter of the American Revolution, or maybe a guy whose University of Minnesota dorm LP's were stolen by Bob Dylan. At this club, a bunch of old guys sing Brassens songs, and for 35€ you can have dinner and listen on Friday and Saturday nights. Sounds like spectator karaoke.

A couple of days ago, I took the municipal bus to Baleruc-les-bains across the lagoon and walked along the shore to judge the recreational potential of beaches. There was a place on the trail with a mural and plaque commemorating the shack of the fisherman "Lolo," which was torn down when they built the path and rip-rapped the shore. Lolo was an ami de Georges. Georges and Lolo would go swimming in the lagoon and collect oysters and mussels and snails, and louncher on them. Louncher is a sètois word meaning something like "slurp down with gusto."

At Lolo's shack, Georges would play the guitar and they'd sing songs. Everyone visited Lolo in the 50s and 60s. Brigitte Bardot and Manitas de Plata are named on the plaque. Salvador Dali said if he visited he would enter through the chimney, and according to legend, he did. He's in the mural, his head poking out of the chimney. The total effect of the monument to the absent shack between the rip-rapped shore and a hedge screening condos was pretty sad in the cold wind and drizzle.

It started raining hard. Tourist restaurants were deep into serving lunch, so I had to duck into a pari-mutuel café, one of those betting bars full of hard-asses who don't particularly like you. Had a café express and waited 20 minutes for the bus; read the newspaper. There was an announcement of the American Day fête in Frontignan. There will be American football, baseball, basketball, cowboys, and Harleys.

The craze in France for the past few months has been the apero facebook. That's an apéritif party announced on Facebook that snowballs so thousands of people show up. In other words, to make a Philly allusion, it's like flash mob on South Street, but everyone drinking red vermouth. They've occurred in several of the cities and large towns, in a central plaza or park, with general rowdiness and a few people trampled or dying of choque éthylique.

An apero was one announced for Sète at the Poufre, which is the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville where there is a fountain with a monumental sculpture of an octopus. Poufre is sètois for poulpe, octopus, which is a local export base and the main ingredient of the famous tielle sètois or poufre pie.

For the apero facebook at the Poufre they had plainclothes cops circulating, and squads of uniformed cops and paddy-wagons. The Red Cross set up a first-aid tent and an ambulence stood by. The city council decreed that only plastic cups could be used, no glass. It was the eve of the Pentecost extended weekend, so it was going to be big. But hardly anyone came. The newspaper said that a few people grimly filled, emptied, refilled, reemptied, and refilled their plastic cups, but nobody went into shock. Many more people stood for a while around the outside of the square or on balconies to watch. The paper said a lone street trumpet player did his best to keep things lively.

It was speculated that either Sète already parties enough without Facebook, or that the apero craze has peaked and subsided.

Yesterday and today we have the neighborhood fête at Pointe Courte, a scenic fishing enclave a few blocks from here. There were kiddie rides, and sea jousting in the lagoon. That's like renaissance jousting, except you ride a ramp on the stern of a rowing boat instead of a horse. A couple of musicians in straw boaters sit at the base of the ramp playing haut-bois and drum.

The two jousting boats were from the Friendly Lance of Sète club, and they were both named Les copains d'abord. That's a Georges Brassens song and Sète motto, meaning my buddies come first. There's a hairdresser's shop across the canal called Les cheveux d'abord.

I asked that pizza man who told me it was the anniversary of the regicide if the sètois liked Louis XVI, since His Late Highness' grandfather created this town out of the mudflats in the 1606s so his kingdom could have a port on the Mediterranean. Pizza man said we don't like the king; same way we don't like anyone important. I asked if they disliked Sarko, and he said, yes, Sarko more than anyone.

I didn't get to ask him about Tony Hayward.

(Andrew Hamilton frequently writes from France. He divides his time between that country and a home near San Francisco. He isn't particulary fond of Philadelphia).

Books Received

Elementary,

Old
Man

Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life

Jenna Woginrich

Storey Publishing

208 pp

$12.95 (Paper)

At 24, living in Nashville, Jenna Woginrich was nurturing her dream of learning to homestead. She didn't own land and she didn't have much practical experience, but she did have a strong desire to be more self sufficient. Jenna was soon able to achieve her dream. Today, at 27, she's srttled on a farm, where she cares for two Huskies, Jazz and Annie, chickens, rabbits, a goat, a turkey, a duck, honeybees, geese, and backyard garden, which provides much of her food. Jenna is a web designer who works in a office by day. She has taught herself to bake, spin, sew, play the fiddle and mountain dulcimer.

Foxhunting

All Washed Up I am sure most people by now have heard about the [British] soap store Lush and its descision to sell a bar of soap in aid of the Hunt Saboteurs Association -- the Fabulous Mrs Fox Bubble Bar. [In Philadlphia the Lush shop is located in Walnut Street].  Whether or not you have, I urge you to really consider buying anything from the store. It is really odd that a major store chain would choose to support such a sensitive issue, and it has already alienated them from thousands of potential customers. Even if you are not a keen supporter of hunting, you should find it wrong that it chooses to directly fund what has i the past, and in many cases still is, an almost militant group. Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance says : "We are aware that Lush supports animal rights charities, and I am sure they are upset that the Hunting Act has failed. Whilst we support the view that everyone has their right to an opinion, there are groups who legally oppose hunting, and the HSA [Hunt Saboteurs Association] is not one of them." Please do not indulge the comany in their ignorance and think twice before buying your friends and family Lush toileteries this Christmas and in future. As always, I hope you take an opportunity to create as much publicity about this group as possible- the internet is one of the most important mediums of communication, and we need to find all the support we can in order that people may recognise our cause, which by the way is possibly the largest of its type on any popular website- invite as many of your friends as possible (I know it takes a little time for people to start a 'causes' link on their page, but assure them it is very important, and very little time in the scheme of things...!), and spread the word! Have fun in the new season and continue as always to stay on the good side of the law. Many thanks, Edward Ponti Administrator, Facebook Foxhunting Cause

Snowing in Northern California

Quick, Maude! Buy Milk and Bread! By Andrew Hamilton Junto Travel Writer Three feet of snow this last 36 hours or so. Still, the big storm is supposed to be tonight and tomorrow, which bodes unwelcome because tomorrow is Sunday and it will probably continue to snow over the Monday, and the county doesn't have money to pay overtime to the snowplow drivers. They graded the county road nice and wide this morning, so they might be able to catch up on Tuesday. This snow has been light and fluffy, it pushes off the deck like whipped cream, so all will be well if it stays cold and we don't get wet snow or rain on top of it. It was such nice snow that I dug a walking trench out the the covered wood-pile, and another one to the burn-barrel, and I even cleaned off the back steps. Mail hasn't come for four days, probably because CalTrans, caught in the budget crisis, hasn't plowed the snow away from the mail-boxes, and it's pretty deep there so the mailman would have to get out and trudge through it ten feet or so to put the mail in the mail-box. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night, sure, but two feet of slag off the edge of the state snow plow, that's another story. I dropped by the post office, which is closed today, to see if there was an announcement. Dolly, the postmistress, was moving around inside there, So I stood for a while outside the glass doors where she could see me forlornly looking at the bulletin board and maybe invite me in to get my Netflix envelope. I would have knocked but there is probably a USPS rule against serving me, and if she isn't married then she's one of the few potentially available old ladies in the north lake area, and I don't want to burn any bridges. From the post-office bulletin board, I learned that the Forest Service owns the borrow-pit at the bottom of Lake Grove Drive and doesn't want people to dump "vegetative waste" there any more, nor will citizens be allowed to borrow rock from there without written permission from the government. Lake Grove Drive is the next drainage downstream from here, populated by a bunch of low-lifes because they have grid electricity, the lazy man's way to satellite TV service. The Forest Service softened the blow, or justified it by claiming that the borrow-pit is a potential LZ for the helicopter ambulance, and so let's keep it clear. Also on the post-office bulletin board were something about the Frenchman Creek school board meeting, and a poster advertising the latest concealed-carry class. For all the rampant liberalism you hear about in California, this is still a western state, and the county sheriffs can issue concealed firearms permits so long as you take the class first. This latest sheriff has won two or three elections, and I suppose he's trading votes for carry permits. For some reason your woods-dwelling yahoo, who will probably never see a scary inner-city home-boy like those guys on TV, deeply feels the need to tote a hidden pistol. The sheriff seems like an OK guy --- I saw him last summer glad-handing citizens up at the Frenchman Creek Store. The only way I could tell he was the sheriff was he was wearing a polo shirt with his name and office embroidered over the pocket, a big advance over these guys who don't go anywhere without SWAT-team gear. Skiing out the front door was good Thursday and yesterday but too deep and soft this morning and too fast on the drive down into here where a downhill neighbor and his minions snow-blew it only one tractor-width wide so there was no room to turn and slow down. Last night I skied down to my next neighbor's just down the drive, and saw they were there, there was a foot-track pushed through the snow and smoke coming out the chimney, which explained the extra truck parked up at the county road. This morning when I went up to the county road to go to the Sasquatch they had dug out their truck and were just leaving. These summer people! They probably came for the three-day weekend but big, storm coming, no balls, time to scarper. I could see by their tracks in the snow that they were wearing those ice chains you strap onto your boots. Those would come in handy in a couple of weeks if it rains on this stuff and then freezes. To be fair, they may be coming back, and if I had a place in the Bay Area with TV reception and gas heat I'd be right behind them myself. The local market up the state highway has been owned by a recent immigrant from the flatlands this past two or three years. This guy was on the front page of the newspaper a while back because he won $15,000 in a blackjack tournament in Reno. This week's paper featured him bitching and moaning because he got turned down for a small business disaster loan he applied for because it was miserable smokey all summer from the forest fires and the tourists didn't come. There was hardly anybody buying the incredibly expensive stale crackers in the market all summer except locals. I got a 20 percent off flyer in the mailbox this fall and redeemed it on some potato chips and onion soup and sour cream. I usually restrict my major purchases there to potato chips because the price is printed on the package at the factory and they can't double it. The shop's proprietor doesn't like me much ever since I asked him to tell Andy, the UPS driver, to not deliver my stuff to the market, but deliver it to me the way he's paid to do, and he got excited and told me in an inappropriately histrionic manner that he has no authority over the UPS driver, which I knew to begin with. Plus, I caught him a couple of months ago loading up on stuff off the shelves at Winco Foods in Redding. It was sort of like catching him doing, I won't say it, something embarrassing, so even though we exchange no words about it we have this ugly memory between us when I go in there, as I did today to buy a half-gallon of milk for the coming snow-in. In addition to which, he now knows that I shop at Winco Foods instead of supporting his market. I used to go into there every few days to buy tobacco products. But, since I stopped smoking, I hardly ever have to face him. Today he was sitting behind the pay counter with his feet up on the window sill, gave me the no-smile civil greeting when I came in. He knew it was me because he could spot me out the window as I skidded up, so he didn't have to change expression . Of course, there is no life lesson here, since he deals with a lot of people besides me, and is a valued member of the community, which designation I have so far effectively shirked. OK, 4:18 pm and it's snowing hard, which is exactly what the Weather Service sent the warning about. I haven't ever seen snow like this anywhere. Yo, I'm not a global warming denialist, buy I am an honourably retired US Department of the Interior scientist who used to work with the sorts of numeric modeling that are designed to predict hydrologic events, but don't predict much more than an arthritic hip would. There's been a glacier growing on the mountain up here behind me for the last three years. I'll tell you what, I wouldn't advise anyone to sell his snow blower, although just to be safe you might still want to move back from the sea-shore (Andrew Hamilton is a Junto travel correspondent who lives in a small town in Northern California, the exact locale of which is unbeknownst to the Editor).

Letter from California: Circa 2001

Fish Tale

By David Houston

Junto Staff Writer

Laytonville, California.

Sindi of Laytonville, Mendecino, County, heard a terrific crash in the middle of the night.

 

She went to investigate. Out on the highway everything was dark. But by flashlight she saw that a tractor trailer had flipped trying to avoid a pickup that had hit and killed a bear.

 

The trucker was nowhere to be found. His truck was loaded with frozen fish,
straight, no boxes. Sindi saw that the fish had broken out and had poured off the road,
filling an adjacent ditch. She waded into the ditch, walking on the frozen fish.

Presently there was a voice.... 'You're... standing on my head!'

Sindi dug down, finding the top of the trucker's head.

 

By then, some other folks from the house had come out, and managed to dig out the trucker -- no doubt saving his life.

The trucker thus became one of the few, if not the only, person whose life was saved on dry land by a school of fish.

 

(David Houston is an artist and writer who lives in Oakland, California).