Solace at the Park

We have consoled ourselves this July for missing the wedding of a much-loved niece in California, by visiting Mint Springs Park every evening.  We go just before sunset, late enough in the day that few people are still at the park.  There are almost always one or two families of fisher people, sometimes a pair of lovers stroll over the dam hand and hand, sometimes mothers with small children play on the slides.  Twice the owner of the scofflaw dog has let him out at the top of the park to run, joyful and unleashed, down to the lower pond.  Every evening there is some surprise waiting for us at Mint Springs.

One night we found joy in the birds.  As we drove up to the park, a heron flew round the pond to the far marshy bit where the stream comes in from the hill above. 

Red-wing blackbirds had flocked and nested here for many years.  Muskrats gnawed down the cattails last fall and winter.  This spring the flock of red-wings returned, checked out the sparse remnants of cattails, and flew on.  This night we discovered two nesting couples of red-wing blackbirds had returned to the diminished stand of cattails. (Sadly, the muskrats, we have heard, have been relocated by park people; their silvery v-shaped wakes always thrilled us.)

We walked around the pond, passing quietly behind the flock of geese that often hangs out on the dam.  Though Canada geese are the hysterics of the bird world, they are so used to us that when we walk behind them they barely murmur anymore. 

 

Tree swallows, swooped over the pond, graceful streaks of blue, and flashed their white bellies as they switched direction.  As we rounded the pond to the farthest and most remote corner, we spooked the heron, who took off from the water with great, slow wing strokes. 

 

A little further into the woods and we heard the cacophony of a few coyotes.  Their howls are high pitched and eerie.

The sundown was the feature of another night.  A line of orange sunlight shone over the western notch and backlit the hills.  Piles of clouds in the east colored first gold, then orange, then rose, and faded into dark gray.  Reflections in the water were brighter than the colors in the sky.  The crescent moon shone in the western sky.   Every night that I have not brought a camera, we have had a beautiful sunset.

Tonight we were tired and sat for half an hour at a picnic table on goose beach watching turtles’ heads surface, gasp air, and then disappear in concentric rings of water.  We listened to the frogs – crickets, green frogs and last, the deep voiced bullfrogs.  Dragonflies darted, touching down to the water from time to time.  Fireflies rained upwards.  A movement caught the corner of my eye just as Ox said “Look, Jenny.”  A young raccoon, oblivious of us, sniffed around the picnic table five yards south of us; he was poking around for supper.   As he got closer to us, I got a little nervous and we stood up.  He startled, then waddled with deliberate speed behind the nearest trees.  He peeked out from behind a near tree, then from between two trees, and as we left so that he could dine, he climbed up the farthest tree.

Two Places

Mint Springs

More than a week ago we walked around the pond at Mint Springs Park.  It was almost dark.  Spring had come to the park showing itself first in the beautiful blossoms of the park’s fruit trees, light against the looming darkness, and then as the eye sharpened, in the soft and feathery look of the hardwood trees on the hills; a few weeks before the hills had looked hard and brushy.

We listened to the mating trill of the small American Toad.  The trill, sounded continuously around the pond except wherever we were; it is a sharp and musical sound, at several closely related pitches.  The small toads roiled the water in the place between the cattails and the bridge to the children’s beach. 

  

A week or two before last week the goose flock had broken into couples.  Now the others left the pond to one couple at the upper pond and one at the lower pond.  In each couple the gander, with pale breast and upright neck, guarded the goose who fed without cease on the turf.   We always talk in low peaceful voices to the couple as we cross the dam.  The geese remain in place but hum anxiously to each other.  A car driven by a scofflaw, drove to the highest point of the park, by Shelter Two, and a dog jumped out the window.  Nothing looks as joyful as a dog freed of its bonds.  The dog ran down to the parking area, defecated, and then ran down and out of sight towards the entrance to the park, followed closely by his owner’s car.  When the dog drew near the geese they squawked  hysterical squawks and flew to the middle of the pond.  We can always count on geese to provide drama.

We thought we saw the wake of the resident muskrats.  They are shy creatures who show themselves towards dark.  The muskrats have taken possession of the beaver lodges left behind when the beavers were relocated a few years ago.

Assateague.   

Today we are staying at Chincoteague and visiting Assateague.  The contrast with our park is overwhelming.  This place is as beautiful as the park.  We drive to Assateague in daytime to look at the ocean and the  birds and in the evenings to gawp at the sunsets.   After many years of consulting Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds, and a few years of consulting Sibley’s, I am still confused by sandpipers, plovers, and ducks.  I’m beginning to sort out the gulls with the help of a list of visiting birds that the NPS posts at the ranger station.  The commonest gulls are the elegant black, gray, and white Laughing Gulls.  These gulls fish the waters in Assateague Channel between Chincoteague and Assateague.  They pose, placed equidistant on the bridge across the channel, tipped forward at just the same angle to spot the fish.  On the beach they face into the wind and the sun.    

The egrets seem more collegial these days than they were.    A pool in the brackish channel on the way to the ocean hosts a variety of egrets.  We’ve seen the beautiful Great Egrets, mingled with Snowy Egrets in the pool, and perched on nearby trees..  The latter have black bills and black legs with yellow toes (to lure careless fish I think).   An occasional squat Cattle Egret hangs out in the pool.  At this season,, the mating plumes of these birds blow gracefully in the wind. The species have no trouble getting along when the fish are abundant.  The Great Blue Heron is more solitary; herons fish by themselves, widely spaced.  They are much rarer than the egrets.

The Snow Geese are here too. We have seen migrating flocks of these birds in mesmerizing murmurations.  The birds are not here in such great numbers this spring, but they still transfix the viewer when they fly close together.  They swirl and dip in beautiful patterns, picked out by the light.  Their patterns remind of the swirls of schools of fish.

Pine bark beetle periodically attacks the pines here.  The pine bark infestations kill local pines, which die and rot, enriching the earth.  Young pines spring up, become infected and die.  The cycle is old.   An area along the road to the beach has been bulldozed – it’ll eventually be an area for penning the ponies.  The area looks devastated – as if a developer has had his way here.  The infested pines have been cut down and hauled away. 

 

The last strong storm that hit Assateague this winter swept away much of the parking area at the beach along with the beach sand.  The sea is eating away at this island.  Now the old parking area is closed for giant earth-moving equipment to do repair work.  Huge piles of red dirt and oyster shells line the old parking area.  A small parking area is open to the north of the old one.    Slightly north of that parking place, signs and ropes close off the threatened Piping Plover's nesting site.

    

Assateague is a barrier island run by the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Chincoteague Firemen.  The firemen run the famous Chincoteague ponies.  The Nature Conservancy owns a large part of the north of the island, which is off limits to tourists.  Assateague is a complicated jurisdiction.

Misty of Chincoteague  was published in 1947 when I was eight,  but  I never read the book. Though I enjoy seeing them often this trip, I’m underwhelmed by the Chincoteague wild ponies.  They are penned sometimes, they are fed when forage is scarce, they are rounded up twice a year for medical checks and vaccinations, and the herd is culled for auction once a year every summer.   They don’t seem very wild.  The ponies and the beach are vital to the economic survival of Chincoteague.  Chincoteague survives on its tourists and its watermen.  For the most part people live here because they love the place.

The wind has been strong this last week and the weather cold.  We had one day and one afternoon of rain.  The colors of the ocean vary with the light.  It has been dark blue, teal, lime green, and pale mint with breakers and reflections tinted peach from the setting sun.  The wind makes a white veil up from the breakers.

I love these two places.  Getting to know them soothes my itchy feet.  Perhaps I'll inhabit some other paradise in some other life.  These are enough for this one.

The Hazel Street Amphibian

Last summer, shortly after the five 2-year old goldfish disappeared from the fishpond, Jackson sat by the pond. He said "Look, Grannie, you have tadpoles." At first I couldn't see them; they were much smaller than the tadpoles at the park. Were he not such a careful observer I wouldn't have believed him. We watched for frogs for a few months and then forgot about them. Over the year since I neglected the pond. The solar bubbler still bubbled away. Leaves fell into the pond; algae grew. Catherine's dog Cricket often drank from the pond.

Yesterday morning I decided to empty the pond and prepare it for new fish. Cricket and Sammy came into the back yard with me. I fed two young apple trees, one baby fig, a rose bush, St.John's wort, and my compost heap with the rich algae water. I scraped the bottom of the pond and took the last full bucket to a clematis plant. When I poured out the black murky water, a frog or toad fell out with the water. I quickly scooped her up with both hands and took her back to the pond; two inches of water were left in it. I left the frog; I am grateful that she inhabits the pond.

The frog had filled my cupped hands (say 4 1/2 inches); she was as dark as the water. As I carried her I didn't see her - I was looking at the ground so as not to stumble. I have looked in the reptiles and amphibians book and am unable to identify her. I hope that she can survive.

Computer Affairs

 Until I was in my late 40s I never sat in front of a computer.  On the first day of a required class, Computers in the Behavioral Sciences, our professor asked us to turn on our computers and follow the instructions on the screen.  Once booted the computer screen instructed “Please type your name.  I typed “Jennie.”  The computer said, “Welcome, Jennie.  How are you?”    I twitched and my mind crashed. 

The computers professor, who was behaviorally oriented, was a good teacher.  He led us step by step, from the surprise of being able to turn on a computer to the basics of the BASIC programming language.  I have seldom had so much fun.  Imagine – I could make a machine do something interesting.  More than that, I quickly realized that computers do well everything that I do poorly – they spell, they do math quickly and accurately, their handwriting is legible.

My favorite programming assignment was to create a subtraction program for elementary school children.  We were to post a math problem with numbers chosen randomly from numbers between zero and twenty, give the student two tries at it, and then, if the answer was still wrong, post the correct answer.  If on either try the student answered correctly, we were to post one of several congratulations.  I took it a little beyond and added a moving stick-figure cartoon and random musical phrase to the congratulatory messages and the sorry, wrong answer, messages.  I then made minor adjustments to the program to make addition, multiplication, and division programs.

I kept playing with the BASIC language after the semester was over.  My proudest achievement was a couple of simple ANOVA programs that would give correct answers.  Later, when I ran the data on my Masters thesis, my advisor made me learn the department’s UNIX machine.  The UNIX gave answers that matched my ANOVA program's answers.

In the throes of my thesis, I invested my teaching stipend in my first computer, a PC Junior.  It was to me an elegant little box.  It had, as computers at the time had, and as I have now, a pitifully small memory.  I knew a doctoral student who said that as she typed the current chapter of her dissertation into her computer, her earlier chapters were falling out the back of the computer’s memory.

Eventually the PC Junior died of old age.  At the time I was working for the University of Virginia and a friend told me the University held regular auctions to sell surplus furniture and electronic gear.  I went to one, and got, for the sum of $25.00, not one, but two computers.  When I got them home I discovered that neither computer had a hard drive.  This was one of the better things that has happened to me.  Because the computers were comparatively cheap, and because I had two of them, I had nothing to lose; I could play around with one of them with impunity.  I sent away for a hard drive at a reasonable price, a book on how to fix your computer, and an anti-static wrist strap.  Installing the hard drive was surprisingly easy (most computers were plug and play even then).  plugging things into the motherboard was as easy as building with legos.  At the end the computer worked well.  Encouraged, I sent away for the other hard drive, installed it and gave that computer to a friend.

The next computer was a Dell desktop, which we used until it’s operating system became obsolete and it lost anti-virus and malware protection.
 

The next to the last computer was a Dell laptop computer.  A few weeks ago it showed distinct signs of a failing hard disk.  I have said for years, on the misunderstanding that laptops were too tiny for my clumsy fingers to fix, that I’d worked on my last computer.  I got a new computer and paid someone to transfer documents and pictures on the old computer to the new computer.  After 18 days in my possession, two of the new computer's usb drives failed and I sent it away to be fixed.

But then, under the influence of computer withdrawal and curious about what a defter geek would do to replace the laptop hard drive, I searched on the  internet with my failing laptop for 'replace laptop hard drive.'  I discovered that it could be done from the outside and one didn’t need tiny fingers.  Once again I have little to lose.  I intend to try to fix the old laptop, maybe replace its dead usb port too (I must be hard on usb ports), and then figure out who needs an elderly laptop.  

Computers have been an entertaining and frustrating hobby for years.   I remember them all with gratitude and pleasure.