We’ve had our first class. Major Jackson runs a tight ship – an economic but effective few minutes of lecture and then a well-structured sequence of readings of each student’s work, followed by a carefully-timed period of discussion. He doesn’t like us to say anything about the poem before reading it so several discussions devolved into speculation about what the poet meant or intended, even as the poet sat there observing. This may seem odd but it’s useful to see all the different ways that certain words or lines can be interpreted by a reader, and I now think this is how all workshops should be run.
We’ve been given an assignment for the week, and since the class runs 9-noon, I went to Pepe’s on the waterfront for a veggie-burger lunch with bacon and onions, 2 Guinesses, and a bowl of clam chowder to fuel my writing. The assignment involves anaphora plus some other strictures and by applying them to a poem I’ve been struggling with for a year, I think I’ve not only finished the assignment but greatly improved the poem. We’ll see. (It’s funny how putting limits and rules on art and poetry can help make them better – as though telling someone who’s sautéing onions that he must do it while spinning plates in the air because this will improve his cooking.)
I love Provincetown, but let’s get the gay thing out of the way. Several of my friends at work couldn’t help but comment on it when I told them I was spending a week here.
I’ve seen P-Town described as a “gay Disneyland” and a “gay Mecca”. I can imagine a gay Disneyland, and frankly it would probably be an improvement. But what about Mecca? Let’s face it: Islam is a religion famous for separating men and women. In most Islamic societies they live in two different worlds, the women among the women and the men among the men. You can’t tell me that some of these men don’t occasionally cast knowing and longing glances at each other and I assume some of the women do likewise. Unfortunately the punishment in Saudi Arabia for this is death, although sometimes they show ‘mercy’ and merely whip the lovers in public. Other Islamic nations follow suit - Iran has executed 4000 gays and lesbians, according to Human Rights Watch and Pakistan is apt to stone them.
So there you have it: Provincetown and Mecca - They both have sand and sun, but Provincetown has great galleries, restaurants, sunsets, nightlife, street life, and human rights. And it’s also more romantic for heterosexuals. – I’ve never been anyplace where I’ve seen so many straight couples holding hands in public!
Ever since I dispatched the woodchucks some of the zucchini plants have started to recover and two of them have produced new fruit. The others became horribly infected from their mauling and are dying in a mass of brown, curling decay.
Meanwhile we’re having our best raspberry and blueberry year ever, and yesterday I harvested enough blueberries to bake up a batch of muffins, using a Jane Brody recipe, for my wife and two musicians from Canada who were staying with us. Today I drove to Provincetown for a poetry workshop while my wife and our two guests went to Wellesley College for a music workshop.
I’m staying at the Carpe Diem Guest House, which is actually a charming cluster of Provincetown houses joined in the back by delighful gardens, and only a block from the Fine Arts Work Center where my classes are held. All the rooms are named after writers – I’m in the Jean Cocteau room and, ironically, there’s nothing in it resembling a desk to sit at and write, so I’ve piled chair cushions on the floor and I’m sitting on them with my computer on a coffee table writing this. Unfortunately the arrangement is less than ergonomic so this entry will be short.
Tonight we had a brief wine-and-cheese orientation for the Fine Arts Work Center where students in all the writing and visual arts classes for this week met and mingled. This was followed by a half-hour mini-class for my poetry workshop, where we met the instructor, Major Jackson, and learned a little bit about our fellow students. I had first heard about Major Jackson in a Radio Open Source interview over the winter and signed up for the workshop on that basis.
I don’t want readers of my blog to think that gardening, for me, is just an endless battle with squirrels and groundhogs. No, sometimes it’s a battle with birds.
I love birds. I’m a card-carrying member of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and I even have the Peterson’s Field Guide Eastern/Central Bird Songs Collection as MP3’s on my iPod. But when they go after my blueberries, relations become, let’s say, a little strained.
My blueberries extend down several terraces of my hillside garden and so are hard to net without an elaborate framing system. In years past the birds have taken so many berries that I didn’t even have enough left for a muffin. Then, a few years ago I hit on a new scarecrow strategy - helium-filled party balloons. The first year it was Tweety Bird and the outcome was this:
Last year it was Shrek, with similar happy results.
In general a good scarecrow balloon should have an irregular shape so that it presents a varying aspect to the birds. It should be big, and preferably have a few appendages hanging down. It should be tied down loosely enough to bounce and move about a bit in the wind, but not so loosely that it gets tangled up in the agriculture. Another important feature is “eyes”. Many birds are wired up to fear anything that looks like a pair of eyes - I suppose because it reminds them of predators. Some moths and butterflies capitalize on this and have circular designs on their wings.
My blueberries have just started to come in and it looks like it will be a good harvest. So this year I got a 4 foot “Elmo” balloon. I’m not quite sure who Elmo is - a character from a children’s TV show, I think - I don’t watch TV. I don’t know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy or a member of SAG or whether he’s controversial or just checked out of rehab or whether he supported the Iraq invasion. And frankly, I don’t care; I’m willing to put the past behind us as long as he does a good job guarding my berries.
A friend of mine wrote to me . . . “Oh Peter, I was with you all the way until I got to that photo of the two little ones. They are soooo cute. Can’t you sacrifice a little zucchini for the good of nature? Or maybe you can buy a few zukes in the supermarket and the woodchucks would be happy to munch on those and leave the good ones”
It would be nice if there was a way to negotiate with them - pay them protection money in the form of squash and a few tomatoes (did I mention what they did to the tomatoes last year?) in return for being left alone.
I can just see a couple of groundhogs in little fedoras, cheap suits and white ties. One of them is carrying a tiny violin case . . .
“Nice garden ya got here . . . too bad if somethin’ was ta happen to it, you know? ‘Stuff’ happens all da time. Did ya hear about the Heinrich’s garden? Tsk - what a shame! And just because he didn’t support his local ‘businessman’s association’, if ya get my drift. We can arrange that nothin - shall we say, ‘unfortunate’? - should happen to your garden in return for a small consideration. Just a few unmarked zucchinis and tomatoes in a brown paper bag left outside our burrow every Monday . . . “
So I stopped at the Agway on my way home from work and bought some “Revenge Mole and Gopher Smoke Bombs”. These devices produce smoke and carbon monoxide and aphyxiation.
The sky was darkening and the wind was freshening as I hurried home. A storm was coming. I got to my house and filled a wheelbarrow with soil and rocks and parked it outside the burrow entrance. By now the sky was black and the wind revealed the white undersides of the tree leaves. I was glad of the weather because it meant that the groundhogs would have retreated to their den where they felt safe, and also for the dramatic backdrop it provided for what I was about to do.
I tied two smoke bombs together, extended their fuzes and tried to light them. The wind blew out the match. A second attempt produced a steady red shower of sparks from the fuzes. I pushed them deep into the burrow as far as they would go and piled rocks over the entrance. As I tamped dirt on the rocks to make an airtight seal smoke poured out around my shovel, but only at first. The air smelled of sulphur. It started to rain.
A week ago I harvested my first zucchini of the season. It was firm and shiny, dark green and plump –nothing like the light and limp well-traveled ones in the supermarket – my zucchini was a pleasure to behold and to eat.
Last year my zukes were destroyed by woodchucks who got in early before the plants matured. This year there had been no sign of them while the plants flowered and the fruit fattened, and I credited improvements I made in my fence over the winter.
My sense of security turned out to be false. Last Wednesday I found some chewed-off stalks. By Friday they had eaten the fruit, the leaves, and more stalks. In desperation I set out live traps; I distributed large blocks of poison; I dropped wires from my electric deer fence, baited with carrots and aluminum foil coated with peanut butter.
The squirrels who recently ate all the apples in my largest apple tree, and then went on to eat the rose hips of the bushes bordering our deck, ate the poison and died. The 6000 volt carrots and the live trap were ignored; and the woodchucks destroyed everything that was left of my zucchini. Every day my fantasies of woodchuck-icide grew more detailed and lurid. My wife wanted to know would I really kill a furry little woodland creature? On Sunday I spied one running across the yard; I had a pitchfork in hand and threw it like a javelin, hoping to impale him, but I missed by an inch. I hadn’t hesitated a second.
This morning at breakfast I looked out my window and saw a little nose poking from a hole near my bulkhead. Then another appeared and two baby woodchucks emerged from the opening. They were cute – far cuter than I wanted them to be. They stood up together, sniffing the air and blinking in the morning sun. I grabbed my camera to take pictures and snapped the shutter just as one gazed directly into the telephoto lens.
They looked soft and cuddly and had pretty white rings around their noses and adorable big black eyes. I tried to remind myself that cuteness serves the same function as an armadillo’s hide, a gazelle’s speed or the smell of a skunk - self-protection. We’re wired up to find babies cute so we don’t strangle them when they take off their dirty diapers and drape them on the cat. Baby woodchucks and other small animals enjoy the collateral benefits of this.
But only to a point. Examining the photos showed that these little groundhogs were covered with flies, and encrusted with something brown and gross-looking. Not so cute close up. Good thing, too.
“In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death.” - Annie Dillard
A few days after I wrote about the mute swans in their narrow little pond near my company’s fence, a fox attacked their nest and destroyed their eggs. Later they abandoned the pond in moved into a corporate reflecting pool where now they swim peacefully with the geese there, since they no longer have anything to defend.
Another swan couple built a nest in a precariously exposed spot between the parking lot and the main road. This nest was featured at the end of the YouTube video mentioned in my last blog entry. There they sat on four eggs. The female did most of the sitting and the male puffed and charged at curious pedestrians and passing joggers for weeks. On late Tuesday afternoon one little cygnet hatched out. And by Thursday morning the baby and the eggs were gone, victims of a red-tailed hawk according to employees of the office building overlooking the nest.
Red tailed hawks are among New England’s most magnificent predators, fierce and proud, beautiful and graceful in flight. Often I hear one shriek overhead while I’m in my garden and when I look up I see a hawk impossibly high in the sky, circling lazily without a single flap of its wings. Not long ago a pair of red tails was doing courtship rituals over my house, soaring, plummeting, calling out, and eventually flying off close together.
But a favorite food of these gorgeous creatures is the small, cute fluffy babies of other animals. Most swans and geese only have one clutch of eggs a season, unless they lose the first one very early, but hawks have to eat. Some animals are more productive – ten days ago I videotaped a mother mallard in my office park swimming around with 10 little ducklings each the size of a tennis ball. And mallards often have 3 or 4 clutches a year. But studies have found that only about half of all mallard ducklings survive their first 30 days in this world, because hawks and foxes and coyotes and weasels all have to eat. I haven’t seen the mallard family in over a week.