It's Good To Have Farmer Friends

Fall started this past week, but it sure doesn't feel like it.  Temperatures have been in a summer-like range of near 90F.  This is matched with a July humidity, bringing late afternoon pop-up rain and thunderstorms.  I think the air conditioner has run more in September than in August.  A heat wave is defined by dictionary.com as:  a prolonged period of abnormally hot weather - which seems to qualify.  The World Meteorological Organization has specified that a true heat wave must be at least five consecutive days where the maximum temperature exceeds the average by nine degrees.  So a finger-wagging meteorologist may point out that it isn't really a heat wave yet, but it has been steamy.  Al Gore says this is inconvenient as he continues to live a delightful 1% lifestyle.

It was seven years ago right now when the agreements were signed to buy my current house.  That day was hot as well, but it was a more typical late summer dry heat.  Among the things I didn't think too much about when I bought my house was the wadi running through the property.  Buying a house is fraught with unseen pitfalls.  Nothing will prepare someone for the reality of moving into a new place.  Real estate disclosures will be cloaked in words to minimize negatives while following the letter of the law.  Home inspectors make money on home sales - realtors will never recommend inspectors who honestly show all flaws resulting in more difficult home sales.  The home-selling industry is designed around making unlikely sales go through.  The buyer and seller are just along for the ride at some point.  But I have no complaints about my current house; nothing beyond a minor annoyance has reared its ugly head and after seven years, any issues at this point are mine and mine alone.
Over the last seven years, the wadi behind the house has slowly filled it.  My back yard is in a local low spot so it sees a fair amount of water.  When I moved in, the ditch was fairly deep and held  quite a bit of water.  Over that time, it has slowly filled in with silt and dirt.  This has been exasperated by drain tile that has failed.  From what I understand, there was a county project years ago which ran two drain tiles on either side of the wadi along its whole length (including far beyond my property line).  This drain tile has had multiple failures.  Two years ago, the result was a nearly year-round swamp.
"You don't know how lucky you are to live by a swamp."  Vic (Dan Aykroyd from the movie Neighbors)
I ended up digging a small trench from the fail drain tile to what remained of the wadi which deswampified the back yard, but created new minor issues as the wadi was largely flat.

In theory, I lease out the back part of my property for farming by a local farmer.  In practice, he has successfully traded capital improvements every year instead of actually paying me.  The actual dollar amount wouldn't be much so I'm OK with it, but the last two years he had issues doing what he said he would do.  This occasionally rankled me.  I asked him to dig out the wadi, not knowing if he was going to, but a few days ago he showed up with his backhoe, digging out a nice smooth trench.  I was thrilled.  This also gave me piles of dirt to fill in some low spots in my yard, especially where the dogs have dug to get at some critter.

I have been surprised how much water has infiltrated the wadi already given the lack of any real rain.  No doubt this is due to the failed drain tile.  It will be interesting to see what happens to this in the spring.

A secondary benefit of the return of the wadi is that I was able to bush-mow the property right up tot he edge of the ditch.  This will make it look better all winter and will help keep both weeds and vermin down.

A lot of the rural roads in the area are being repaired (and I use the term loosely) by chip seal.  I first encountered chip seal on my motorcycle road trip to Alaska and learned to live with it in the barely unfrozen North.  Locally though, they use a phenomenal amount of gravel compared to the scarcity mentality I saw in the Yukon.  There were piles and ridges of gravel several inches deep in some places.  I was almost home riding through the stuff with serious pucker-factor when a nearby neighbor started tail-gating me.  I'm not sure if she knew it was me or not, but it didn't help the situation much.  On a heavy motorcycle, recently layed chip seal might as well be a loose gravel road.  It might as well be a greased road.
Once swept up and hardened, chip seal isn't too bad, but I'll probably be going out of my way to avoid some of the worst roads, especially the ones that are lightly travelled where it may be weeks before excess gravel is swept up.

I guess even with the hot weather, the chip seal is a sign of the changing seasons.  Leaves are starting to fall.  Bean fields are becoming yellow.  Corn is dying.  Maybe fall is here?

"Look What You Did!"

I was on my way home from work, driving along a semi-rural road; newer housing development on one side, wooded area bordering the river on the other.  Up ahead, I saw a large bird exhibiting some very strange behavior.  The bird was hopping backwards, dragging the carcas of what turned out to be a dead raccoon across the road.  Then I realized that the dead raccoon was the one I had hit that morning on the way to work.

The bird flew off before I could see whether it was a very large crow or a very small buzzard.  Either way, it was impossible not to anthropomorphize the bird, with the it clearly screaming, "You killed this raccoon, MF!  Look what you did!  Just ... Look ... At ... What ... You ... Did!"

My morning had been like any other.  I drive to work in the dark and always see at least a couple animals: possums, deer, raccoons, the occasional skunk.  There are very few streetlights during my commute, so often I just see their eyes ghostly reflecting the light from my headlights.
I just requested The Straight Story from the library...  It seemed appropriate.
But that morning, a raccoon had been on the side of the road.  He saw me, I saw him.  We both took evasive action.  Unfortunately we both took evasive action right into each other.  My front left tire made direct contact into dire consequences to the raccoon.
I felt bad.

I do hunt, so it may seem surprising that killing the raccoon made me feel bad.  Our rural roads are littered with road kill - it happens all the time.  But I don't like indiscriminate killing, killing for killing's sake.  Maybe it is because I hunt that I'm sensitive to this.  Killing an animal as a deliberate act to take it home and eat it is entirely different from killing an animal on my way to work.  Thud-thud.  The raccoon dies.  So it goes.
The year I started hunting, a deer I shot was not recovered.  This made me feel very, very bad at the time.  The next season I found a deer skeleton about 100 yards beyond where I, and my neighbor who I was hunting with, stopped looking for the doe.  I've always wondered if that was the same deer.  I learned two lessons.  One, don't take iffy shots (it wasn't, but I was excited).  Two, if in doubt, always look a little more.

But there is an even larger lesson from an old deer skeleton.  From the road kill that lay strewn across the roads.  From the thud-thud of my truck's tires in the early morning hours.  These dead animals don't lay around in perpetuity.  Our roads are not strewn with an ever increasing pile of carcasses.  Nothing in nature ever goes to waste.
From the putrid, road-kill skunk to the ground hog shot by a pellet gun after the third attempt to dig his hole along my house to the enormous dead whale on the bottom of the ocean, everything gets eaten.  Everything dead feeds something else.
No, maggots and flies, coyotes, and turkey vultures may not be the most cute and cuddly of wild animals, but they all thrive on the dead.  I've seen road-kill deer be turned into scattered bones within a matter of days in the heat of summer.  The last remnants may go slowly, but feed a rich biome of microorganisms to trees.

So maybe that odd bird, hopping backwards across the road dragging the raccoon remains wasn't screaming how evil I am.  Maybe that anthropomorphized avian was saying, "Look what you did!  You made me dinner.  I'm gonna eat well on this dead SOB!"