bye bye barn

in december of 2006, the roof of the big old hip-roofed barn across the street collapsed. it had been neglected by the absentee landlord. shingles from various layers of roofing had fallen off; there were holes in the roof which was sagging more and more until a wet snow storm did it in. and gradually more and more of the barn fell apart.  it made me feel very sad. there is an organization that works to save barns in michigan, but it was too late for this one. the photo above shows the last part standing in mid-september 2009.

all we know of its history is that it would have been our barn, if we had lived here maybe 50 or more years ago. someone said it looked like an early 20th century structure, but i'm not sure. it was an integral part of a large working farm belonging to a family named sopp. next to it were two sheds, one for farm equipment and another of indeterminate use, and the concrete floor that was the remains of a milk house. we know that the pater familas living in our house committed suicide by hanging himself in the barn. there is a pleasant lady who lives on earhart that remembers this happening sometime in the late 1930s. she attended the little one-room school on the corner of six mile and earhart, and confirmed that the teacher at that school rented the bedroom upstairs in our house. from third to eighth grade she was the only child in her class. when she told me the year she was born, i realized that she is only ten years older than i am. yet her life as a child here in the country seems long ago and very different.

her son is part of the crew that has been tearing down the barn and sheds. fortunately, one of our friends in ann arbor came out and salvaged some of the lovely weathered barn wood to make a meditation hut in her yard. i hauled over some slender poles that had formed part of a round corral, recently built, to cut up for intermediate size firewood. i picked up a few rocks and an old rusted sickle. i've always wanted a sickle. as a good deed, i collected some dozen batteries that were lying around.

watching the process of dismantling the barn has sometimes seemed like a spectator sport, as neighbors out walking their dogs or strangers passing in cars stop to watch the bulldozer at work or the flames leaping up from the burn pile. almost all the lumber from the large barn has been burned, a lot of it at night, frightening one of our dinner guests. the crew of local guys doing the demolition job are friendly, jolly, always smoking cigarettes and willing to chat, and encouraging everyone to take away anything they like, it's less for them to deal with.

that pile above is the remains of the shed, which the irresponsible tenants renting the little ramshackled house had simply used as a place to dump their oversize garbage: several mattresses, old cans of paint, a broken rototiller, a smashed kitty carrier, some moldy horse tack, things like that, just to name a few. i didn't want to look too closely. the tenants left the first of september, without telling the absentee landlord, without cleaning out the refrigerator, and setting loose two large female domestic rabbits and 14 baby bunnies. other neighbors saw the little black lop-ears scampering under the house and called 'rabbit rescue'. two serious women arrived with live traps. they were suitably outraged; threatened to sue for animal cruelty. they went in the house, which was unlocked, to make sure no animals were abandoned inside, and reported that it stank to high heaven and was utterly trashed. people had been living there only a few days before.

 this is all that was left on september 25, and today even that is gone, up in flames or in a dumpster.

 the house is filled with fleas, bats are living in the top somewhere, and the well is polluted. the landlord isn't planning to try renting it any time soon. maybe we should be more outraged ourselves,  but mostly i am just happy that the rough-neck trashy tenants are gone and i don't have to look at the painful progressive collapse of a lovely old hip-roofed barn everyday. and, now we have a new vista from our living room across fields of soybeans to the distant forest.

remembering bill minor

my cousin bill minor (william faulkner minor, no relation to the novelist) of ivy, virginia, died on the 13th of august, 2009. he was 84. i wrote the following for his memorial.

Bill’s wide knowledge and love of nature, his activism, and his ability to write so interestingly about it, had an important influence on me. He was a wonderful writer in several genres. In the last years of his life he wrote some entertaining personal memoirs that evoke the outdoor-loving boy whose interests would grow and sustain him. they also remind us of life in an earlier time.

About sledding one winter in Cannel City, Kentucky, where he lived as a boy: “On that day the snow was unusually deep and light, and Merle Watson and I belly-flopped on our Flexible Fliers high up in the ridge and came zooming down through clouds of crystalline powder. Something—the angle of the light, the dryness of the snow, perhaps our age—made it unforgettable.”

“Early in the fall, wood, split and ready for burning, was piled on our back porch in two rows… By the time I was eight to ten years old I could identify the woods of white oak, red oak, hickory, ash, black gum, sassafrass and chestnut by sight and a few, like sassafrass, by odor.” He goes on to say that he had “a great deal of fun” when his father taught him how to split wood, as what was a chore for other boys was a joy for him.

In a longer piece on his Aunt Mary and Uncle Rob Cole’s house at 1108 Park Street in Charlottesville, he recalled the entrance hall: “To the right hung a large moose head over a coat rack, with and old Civil War vintage pistol hanging from one of the pegs. Underneath it was a double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun…The most interesting place in the house to me in my pre-teen years was probably the bookcase in the back hall, which was filled with old National Geographic magazines. I pored over them so many times that I still remember the titles of many articles. They were crammed with articles on birds, insects, and other areas of natural history, in which I was very interested.”

These were among the chores he was given: helping to clean the house, weeding the flower garden, doing the grocery shopping at the downtown safeway, taking checks to the bank, mowing the lawn, snapping beans, peeling and canning okra, tomatoes, and peaches, making sausage and cider. and the important job of putting out the card to show the iceman how many blocks to leave. he caught black widow spiders for biology class, hit an endless number of golf balls, shot squirrels with a .22, held down a calf in the back of Cousin Robbie’s station wagon, and snuck in late at night by climbing up on the roof of the bay window and into his second floor bedroom. aunt mary didn't allow liquor in her house, but "occasionally there was a fair amount inside George, Robbie, and me."

In the ‘70s Bill wrote a nature column for the Syracuse Eagle-Bulletin under the pen name of ‘Senex.’ He chose to remain anonymous, he said, because he didn’t want “some damn woman coming up to me on the street and telling me I had it all wrong.” (It seems very unlikely to me that he would ever have gotten anything wrong, for he was a scientist with a broad knowledge of many fields).

Senex wrote about a wide range of topics: hawks, owls, salamanders, goldenrod, what you could see at the moment in your back yard, and environmental issues, like the dangers of invasives such as loosestrife. His articles were told from a personal but not pretentious or preachy point of view, full of information, enriched with photographs, sketches he’d made, or details from works of art. He often added poems and other literary references—I recall something from Shakespeare, and maybe John Updike. This would be relatively easy now with information on the internet so easily accessible, but Senex was writing well before he had computers at home. He enjoyed writing and no doubt the readers of the paper were fortunate to have his columns as a resource.

Over the last couple of years I worked with Bill in transcribing the surviving diaries of his Aunt Sallie, who raised him from childhood after his mother died. I’ll miss his cigarette-infused gruff voice on the phone: “Julia! Bill Minor here. I’ve found out one more thing to explain where Aunt Sallie must have forded the Rivanna…”

I too am writing down some of my memories of growing up in Charlottesville a decade or so after Bill, and I am active as a volunteer for various environmental groups in Michigan. I write a blog—Senex would have been a natural blogger, I think—often including what I’m learning about nature. All this is to the good, and I am thankful for Bill as a source of wisdom and inspiration, proud that he was my cousin (even if I can’t say how we’re related without looking way back on the excruciatingly complex Minor family tree), admiring of the way he yelled back at George W. Bush on television, and always grateful for the warm hospitality with which he and Maureen welcomed me into their home.

tree measurers, not tree huggers

here kim wells and i are measuring a large white oak on a bioreserve assessment site in lyon township, while lisa peshke took the photo. assuming kim and i can reach six feet each (our hands were touching on the other sides), the tree must be about fourteen feet in circumference. that's a big tree, but they come bigger: michigan's largest recorded white oak is more than eighteen feet in girth.

i've been on seven assessments now and each has been different. the biggest adventure was when three of us got lost, trying to avoid crossing an irregularly shaped wetland by heading for higher ground. we became disoriented and soon were off the map of the site we were to assess. we didn't have a compass but could see the sun getting dangerously low in the west. another was when the landowner had forgotten that we were coming and judging from the liquor on his breath at ten on a saturday morning apparently had been starting his weekend early. he got disoriented in his own forest, but the other volunteer pulled out his iphone and the gps saved the day. hi-tech can be useful

there are so many abandoned agricultural fields growing up in invasive plants to be seen everywhere driving around the countryside. the more i learn and the more i see, the more discouraging it is.

so, filled with the desire to keep learning, i'm taking a field biology class at the community college. i've had two previously, one on trees and one on winter field study, but this is taught by a new professor, full of enthusiasm and some different ideas. one requirement is that we choose a spot somewhere in the natural world to sit in each week for at least thirty minutes and write a field journal entry on what we observe. of course, this appeals to me very much.


if you look very closely you can see my chair at the edge of the swamp to the north of our hayfield. it will be interesting to see how this little landscape changes over the next four months. one of the most photogenic plants that i can see from my chair is the cucumber vine (Echinocystis lobata) also called the 'wild balsam apple.' it is in the gourd family.


the pod looks dangerously bristly but in fact the little prickles are quite soft. it's enough to just mimicing a scary look to keep a passing deer from taking a nibble. inside is a pulpy, slippery white lobed capsule that covers four large brown and white seeds. these are perfectly camoflaged to disappear into the damp melange of soil below when they fall. i know, because i dropped one and couldn't find it at all. this is another form of insurance that it will reproduce and not end up in the stomach of a possum or racoon.

looking on line, i found that the attractive seeds were used by the Oglala for beads. and that various native american tribes used the 'cucumber' itself and/or its roots for a number of medcinal purposes, from stomach troubles to reumatism to chills and fevers. the menominee called it the 'greatest of all medecines' and also considered it a love potion.

the cucumber vine is native and not in any way an endangered species, and i do wonder if its powers have been tested by the conventional pharmaceutical establishment.