On rainy days I finished putting up windows and closing openings in the new loft, and on sunny ones I shingled. Some of the trim pieces were either too thick or too thin, and these I put aside to use for kindling, but from most of them I could make three sixteen-inch shingles. I cut a stack on the table saw and then nailed them up, using a chalk line to keep the rows straight. The barn, to which Liddy and Brian’s sculptured ridgebeam had given a head and tail, now, with its coat of tawny, rough, wooden shingles, looks like a shaggy beast squatting out there. I like it a lot.
I have made the bee equipment for my three-hundred hives myself, but real carpentry has always been beyond me. The skills that Liddy and Brian taught me and the practice I had on the barn went right to my head, and after the barn was finished I built a pump house with some help from a carpenter friend.
The pump house at the back of the cabin contained my well and pump. It was an ugly little building, all of its angles and proportions wrong. In addition, it has been rotting gently into the ground for five or six years. Last winter I draped a tarpaulin over the remains of the roof, but I knew that it would not last another one. It has stood there all this time, ill-seeming and an accusation each time I went out the door.
The location of the well meant that the pump house would have to be in an obtrusive spot. I had asked Liddy and Brian what I could do to make a new one look better. I wondered about an asymmetrical roof, but Brian cautioned me against it, pointing out that the buildings around the farm were all symmetrical and balanced.
“Build something asymmetrical in this setting and it will look like Quasimodo,” he said.
In my mind I worked out what I wanted, and with a carpenter friend’s help we built a neat little building. But when we came to the peaked roof, we found that we had to add a second, higher, removable, overlapping roof to one side to allow space for the pump to be pulled out in case repairs are needed. I have indeed built Quasimodo, but as with Quasimodo, it is likable. It is smaller, better-proportioned than the old pump house, sided with weathered barn siding, trimmed in International Harvester red which highlights the faded red of the barn boards, and roofed and hump-roofed in ripply tin. It is a cheerful and satisfying little building to have outside my back door, a good companion to the great shaggy barn beyond.
Buoyed by the prospect of being able to build something that serves its purpose and looks the way I want it to look, I repaired the chicken coop and put it to rights, added several features to the honey house and main part of the barn that I have always wanted, and then, as the weather became colder, moved inside the cabin to finish my office, a place of studs, very little wallboard and half a ceiling. Finishing that was so exhilarating that I turned to the bedroom. Like the office, it has stood unfinished since Paul left, and in the past two weeks I have ripped it apart and rebuilt it in a rather massive way. Yesterday I finished and carried all the tools back out to the barn: saw horses, circular saw, variable speed drill and driver, carpenter’s level and square, tape measure and tin cans full of screws and nails.
Then I cleaned up the bedroom and rearranged the furniture. When I went to bed last night to read, as I usually do, I realized after a while that I was not reading the book propped up on my knees at all. Instead, peering over the top of my glasses, I had been admiring the new room around me and had been lost in reverie, smiling foolishly and thinking with gratitude of what Liddy and Brian had given me with their carpentry lessons.
WINTER
I am rich in birds today, especially in bluebirds and cedar waxwings. The bluebirds—eastern bluebirds, to be precise—nest here less and less during the summer but congregate in flocks in winter. Brilliant blue, with rust-colored breasts and white bellies, they have been here for over a month eating sumac berries and the fruit of the pepperidge trees that grow all around the cabin, chittering contentedly to one another as they feed. The waxwings, however, are erratic visitors, and never before have I had them in such numbers or in such steady attendance. I have been seeing and hearing them for several weeks now.
Today, after three days of rain and sleet which made it hard for them to feed, the sun rose in a clear sky, and not long afterward I could hear the tsee-tsee of the cedar waxwings in the trees. I had spent the past days of sleety weather inside the cabin labeling honey jars, a necessary but boring job, and I too was glad to see the sunshine. I put on a jacket, hung my binoculars around my neck and went out to watch the waxwings. There must have been hundreds of them visible in the bare treetops. I could hear them everywhere. The bluebirds were perched on the power lines and separately in their own trees, although here and there I could see one in among the cedar waxwings. Goldfinches in dull winter plumage were flying between trees in swooping flight, singing as they do in summertime on each dip. Cardinals, chickadees and nuthatches were jostling one another at the feeder. On the ground, which was still covered with frost in the shadows of the barn and outbuildings, juncos—small, trim, neat gray-and-white birds—were scratching for weed and grass seeds so earnestly that they did not even fly up as I walked among them.
I went out into the field. Bluebirds were singing on all sides, calling back and forth quizzically: chur-wee? chur-wee? I could also hear cedar waxwings from over by the barn, and through my binoculars I could see that they were settling down to feed in the little persimmon grove. The persimmon trees flower in June, when the bees work the blossoms for nectar in such buzzing numbers that when I am walking in the woods I can hear a persimmon grove long before I see it. The fruit the bees help to set is smaller than the Oriental persimmons found in specialty markets, but it is tasty and high in sugar content after it is ripe. It ripens late, not until after frost; before that it is bitter and acrid. I once bit into one too soon. My mouth puckered immediately, and the astringent effect lingered on into the next day. But ripe persimmons are sweet and flavorful, and I had intended to shake down the fruit of those trees in back of the barn and make a pie from them for a couple who are friends. The wife is an excellent cook but she told me once that pies are beyond her, although she likes to eat them. I am no cook at all, but I rather fancy making pies when I have someone to make them for because they look so pretty when they are finished. I was invited to dinner with my friends and was going to take them a persimmon hickory-nut pie as a surprise. But the cedar waxwings needed the persimmons more than my friends needed a pie, so I am glad I never got around to shaking the fruit from the trees.
I went up into the barn loft for a closer look. The new storage loft put me right at the level of the tops of the young trees, and the windows allowed me a close look without disturbing the birds. They were feeding so greedily, however, that I doubt if I could have disturbed them anyway.
Cedar waxwings are sleek, elegant birds, crested and brownish-backed. Their bellies are creamy white. A bright band of yellow tips their tails, and their wings are banded in red. A black band runs from beak top around their eyes to the back of their head, giving the party in the persimmon trees the air of a masked ball. One of my bird books calls them, fancifully, “birds of mystery.” This is because they are wanderers. Out of breeding season they are social birds who congregate in such big groups that they quickly deplete the food in any one spot, so they are always on the move. They appear one day in numbers, eat everything—insects when they can find them, fruit of any kind, dogwood berries and, like the bluebirds, sumac and pepperidge—and then fly on, not to be seen again. Their presence here for nearly a month seems highly unusual, but this was a good year in these parts for the kinds of things that cedar waxwings like to feed on and even now there is still plenty for them to eat.
Thomas Nuttall, the nineteenth-century eccentric whose name was given to more species of plants and animals than any other naturalist, claimed cedar waxwings were excessively polite to one another. He said that he had often seen them passing a worm back and forth down a whole row of beaks before it was finally eaten. I would enjoy seeing this, but I never have. Today the birds I was watching from the loft were rav
enously hungry after the days of bad weather, and though they did not take persimmons from one another so that in a sense their behavior might be called “polite” they did not pass food around, either. Instead, each bird chose a single persimmon, tore at the skin to get to the sweet soft pulp inside, gobbled it down in big lumps, and then hopped to another free persimmon to gorge again. They were feeding so intently that they stopped calling to one another. I watched them for a long time, until, their hunger stilled, they flew off to a different tree, where I could see them through the binoculars preening and sunning and hear them socializing sibilantly, tsee-tsee-tsee, in a satisfied way.
This is the recipe for the pie I would have made:
1 graham-cracker crumb crust
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 eggs, separated
2/3 cup milk
1 cup strained wild persimmon pulp
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup hickory nuts, chopped
Heavy cream for whipping
In a saucepan combine the brown sugar, gelatin and salt. Beat the egg yolks lightly and add to the milk. Stir into the brown sugar mixture and cook, stirring constantly, until mixture is thoroughly heated and sugar is melted. Avoid boiling. Remove from heat and stir in persimmon pulp. Chill for approximately one hour or until soft mounds form when mixture is dropped from a spoon.
Beat the egg whites until soft peaks appear. Add the sugar gradually, beating until stiff. Stir the hickory nuts into the chilled persimmon mixture and fold into the beaten egg whites. Turn into crumb crust and chill until firm.
Serve with sweetened whipped cream.
The best place to store firewood is in an airy shed, protected from rain and snow. I wish I had such a shed but I don’t, so I stack my firewood out in the open down below the barn. Each morning in the late fall and winter, I split enough wood for the second day, carry it to the cabin and pile it near the wood stove where it can dry.
As the wood warms, the wood cockroaches that sometimes live under the bark are roused and creep out. They are smaller than the American cockroaches that, even in the tidiest of houses, invade kitchens at night looking for scraps of food, but they are bigger than the familiar German cockroaches that live in most kitchens and bathrooms. German cockroaches are called Croton bugs in the northeast because they were first noticed in New York in the mid-1800s, when the Croton aqueduct was built. It is a safe bet that the Croton bugs noticed human beings well before then, for roaches sized us up long ago as the providers of good habitat. Their relationship has been so close that there probably is not a human alive so entomologically ignorant that he cannot identify a cockroach when he sees one.
My wood roaches, which come in several species, are dark brown and shiny, and are seldom a problem for human beings. They usually live outside houses and eat wood, a diet made possible by the fact that their gut is inhabited by the same intestinal protozoans which allow termites to digest wood. This is one of the reasons termites and cockroaches are believed to have a common ancestor somewhere in the distant past.
Cockroaches are possibly the most successful complex life form this planet has ever seen. Geological dates are inexact, but will serve for comparison. Humans have been around for perhaps two million years. Honeybees, along with flowering plants, evolved sometime during the Cretaceous period, some 100 million years ago. But before that, back in Upper Carboniferous times, 250 million years ago, fossil records show that roaches—at least 800 different kinds of them—were scuttling about. On the average, they were somewhat bigger than any of the 1,200 species of roaches that exist now, but none of the fossil forms are any bigger than contemporary tropical ones. The differences between those fossil cockroaches and the ones of today are slight, and mainly involve the position of the wing veins.
The world was quite a different place in those days: warmer, moister and filled with animals and plants that would seem strange to us. The ancient seas washed on different beaches. The waters had started to recede from the central part of this continent, and in the swamps and marshes along the shores grew giant horsetails, ferns, mosses and primitive conifers. There were no flowers. Huge dragonflies filled the air. There were no birds. Primitive amphibians and reptiles walked the land, and cockroaches scuttled about, feeding on plant and animal materials and debris just as they do today.
Climate, land masses, plants and animals changed through the ages, but not the cockroaches. They had found a form even then that worked exceedingly well, a form perfect for survival on this planet, and natural selection doesn’t argue with success.
They were and are neither too big nor too small. Their low-slung, flattened bodies allow them to hide in the merest sliver of protective space. They could and can live in a wide variety of habitats and temperatures, and eat almost anything. They are tough, spunky, wary and alert all of their lives. Young roaches hatch from leathery egg cases ready to run. Like their cousins the grasshoppers, katydids and crickets, they do not undergo a complete metamorphosis. They do not spend periods of their lives as vulnerable, wormlike larvae or quiet pupae rearranging their body tissue and structures. Instead, they undergo a gradual metamorphosis. Young hatchling roaches look very much like adults, except that they are tiny and lack wings. They shed their outer skins several times before they reach reproductive adulthood, but at every stage they are quick and agile. Adults can fly, but more typically run.
They have never become specialized; they have always been highly flexible, able to adapt to any changes that the world has in store. I was not surprised when I read that a researcher had discovered cockroaches could learn things even after their heads had been cut off, for back when I first started keeping bees if I opened a beehive and found roaches inside, believing myself to be the bees’ ally, I would cut the cockroaches in two with my hive tool. Invariably, the nether end would scurry off, apparently able to function quite nicely without the head it had left behind.
There are always American cockroaches in beehives. Like human houses, beehives are warm, snug places, well-stocked with food, and roaches live there if they can get away with it. When a colony of bees is active, healthy and strong, the bees will not tolerate roaches any more willingly than does a fussy housekeeper. I have often watched honeybees chasing cockroaches out of their hives, and have also seen them carrying out roach egg cases and dropping them some distance away, recognizing that they are objects inappropriate to a well-regulated bee colony. There is constant strife between the two species. The bees are vigilant and aggressive, but the roaches are always there, and at the least drop in hive strength or morale, they take over. They are opportunists.
In the past few years, I have left off killing cockroaches when I open a beehive. I now know that a good colony of bees can take care of them on their own better than I can. And if a colony is not a good one, I had better find out what is wrong with it rather than kill its roaches.
In truth, I don’t mind the wood cockroaches that come in on my firewood, either. Their digestive system and mine differ enough so that we don’t share the same ecological niche; they do me no harm, we are not competing, so I can take a long view of them. There is no need to harry them as a bee would, or to squash them as a housewife would. Instead, I stoop down beside them and take a closer look, examining them carefully. After all, having in my cabin a harmless visitor whose structure evolution has barely touched since Upper Carboniferous days strikes me, a representative of an upstart and tentative experiment in living form, as a highly instructive event. Two hundred and fifty million years, after all, is a very long view indeed.
A group of people concerned about a proposal to dam the river came over to my place last evening to talk. The first to arrive was my nearest neighbor. He burst excitedly into the cabin, asking me to bring a flashlight and come back to his pickup; he had something to show me. I followed him to his truck, where he took the flashlight and switched it on to reveal a newly killed bobcat stret
ched out in the bed of his truck. The bobcat was a small one, probably a female. Her broad face was set off by longer hair behind her jaws, and her pointed ears ended in short tufts of fur. Her tawny winter coat, heavy and full, was spotted with black, and her short stubby tail had black bars. Her body was beginning to stiffen in death, and I noticed a small trickle of blood from her nostrils.
“They pay thirty-five dollars a pelt now over at the county seat,” my neighbor explained. “That’s groceries for next week,” he said proudly. None of us back here on the river has much money, and an opportunity to make next week’s grocery money was fortunate for him, I knew. “And I guess you’ll thank me because that’s surely the varmint that’s been getting your chickens,” he added, for I had said nothing yet.
But I wasn’t grateful. I was shocked and sad in a way that my neighbor would not have understood.
I had not heard a shot and didn’t see the gun that he usually carries in the rack in his pickup, so I asked him how he had killed her.
“It was just standing there in the headlights when I turned the corner before your place,” he said, “so I rammed it with the pickup bumper and knocked it out, and then I got out and finished it off with the tire iron.”
His method of killing sounds more savage than it probably was. Animals in slaughterhouses are stunned before they are killed. Once stunned, the important thing was to kill the bobcat quickly, and I am sure my neighbor did so, for he is a practiced hunter.
Others began to arrive at the meeting and took note of the kill. One of them, a trapper, said that the going price of $35 a pelt was a good one. Not many years ago, the pelt price was under $2. Demand for the fur, formerly scorned for its poor quality, was created by a ban on imported cat fur and a continuing market for fur coats and trim.
A Country Year Page 10