Walking

Concerned about a long spell of declining physical activity, I recently started taking long walks each morning. Wherever I’m going, either walking or driving, the dog rarely stays behind and Farina has been my companion on these ambles through the dust and weed along the back roads of Oak Hill, Florida. I had long thought that walking the rural dirt roads out here for any distance would be tantamount to a stroll through hell. I imagined myself choked with dust, savaged by mosquitos and their biting brethren and tormented by heat and humidity. None of that has proven to be close to the reality I’ve discovered. Fact is, my walks have all been in the kinder seasons of what passes for autumn and winter at this southern latitude. On several walks I’ve been protected from a January chill by long sleeves, and on one occasion even left home wrapped in a scarf and gloves. But those occasions are fewer than the days when I get by in nothing heavier than jeans and a T-shirt. I suspect that come summertime, the walks will bring me closer to that imagined stroll through hell. For now, it’s all pretty much a soothing passage through pastoral sights colored by horses, goats, a herd of burros and staring cows. And some rather nasty winged creatures.

An almost daily sight on the roads I follow is the black vulture. Few would call these ominous looking and foul-smelling birds a pretty sight, feeding as they do on road-kill or dead animals in pastures. Florida wildlife experts describe black vultures as aggressive, on occasion killing or injuring lambs, calves, cows giving birth, or other incapacitated livestock. It may be true that under the right circumstances they are aggressive birds but they waste no time in getting airborne when my big dog comes loping toward them. Last week I came upon a dozen or so vultures feeding on a threesome of large leg bones, by then all but stripped bare. When I got a closer look, it was easy to see that the bones were parts of a discarded deer carcass. Apparently, an uncaring hunter cut off the desired parts and tossed the remainder on the roadside. Some hunters in these woods don’t follow the rules.

A favorite sight along these walks is a small pond at road’s edge, a watery refuge that suddenly appears from behind a spray of palmetto fronds and always seems so placid and inviting. It is obviously a pond created from the run off of a larger pond across the road but the larger one lacks the secluded charm of its smaller offshoot. I stop without fail each time to gaze for a minute at the pretty scene. I’ve never seen more than a solitary duck drifting on the water’s surface, a graceful shape slipping in and out of the reeds. It all looks peaceful enough but in this area an alligator could float to the surface at any moment. 

Not far from the pretty pond is a small detail in the road that I noticed only after a dozen or more passings. The road in this case is blacktopped and while old, ragged and worn, it offers a different feel after a couple of miles on dirt with the ever-present potholes and washboard surface. And In the surface of that worn blacktop road is an unexpected and out of place accident of design. I’ve puzzled over it and can’t figure how it came to be there. Anyone would recognize it as a leaf shape set into the road but this one is different.

I’ve seen examples of images burned onto a surface in the case of a sudden and intense flash of heat. The first time I saw the leaf shape in the road I thought of that. But a closer look reveals that the image is pebbled and either hammered or pressed into the road surface. It resembles a maple leaf but has only four points to a maple’s five. How that leaf shape came to be in the blacktop is something of a  mystery.

A shorter walk from home in the opposite direction leads to a bee colony at the end of my road where it dwindles to little more than a trail. A junk baron in town owns the land down there and probably inherited the hives from a previous owner. Once every week or two a truck comes to collect the honey-filled frames and carry them to where the honey is bottled. A gift bottle arrived at my gate one day so I can attest to the honey’s goodness. It came from a neighbor who earned two dozen bottles of free honey a while back for scaring off a trio of honey thieves who thought no one was around. Since then the junk baron keeps my neighbor in shotgun shells to ward off potential thieves. 

View from a Chair

It came from a long gone thrift shop, a $15 tag affixed to one burly arm, an old rough-hewn chair hammered together in someone’s garage and slathered with a tea brown stain over its anonymous woodgrain. Solid as rock and heavy to shift, it has a slatted back and bottom, strong, heavy arms and was clearly crafted by a person who knew what he was doing. The legs are flush with the floor and solid as concrete pillars impossible to wobble, a chair sumô wrestling champions could bounce upon with complete confidence. 

Four years now the chair with its tacky blue plastic cushions has been my back porch seat looking out into the back half of two acres crowded with old oak trees and swaths of grass ravaged nightly by hungry armadillos digging for grubs. Armadillos are but one the pests preying upon, or living in this quiet cathedral of green. Mosquitos, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, gopher turtles and the occasional snake also call this patch of coastal marshland home and are easily the oldest denizens of the landscape. I am no more than a late coming intruder with ideas of taming the land to my notions of civilization. The wrap around screen of this back porch helps me to believe I’m doing a pretty good job of keeping the less pleasant critters at bay. Like the glass cages at a zoo, the screen puts a barrier between me and the “wild” outdoors.

The chair is also my front row seat to an ever moving flit and flutter of birds coming and going, socializing, quarreling and courting around the bright red bird feeder hung from a fat branch of the camphor tree just off the porch. Despite my almost daily attendance to the bird drama fifteen feet in front of my chair, the names of all the birds remain a mystery. I recognize the cardinals, the beaming red males and rust red females, the bossy blue jays, the doves and nervous sparrows, but there are some I can’t name despite a search through the bird books. One, a small gray and white bird with a tufted head sings with such a powerful burst of sound, caught off-guard you’re likely to drop your coffee cup. He’s a songbird of sorts to rattle even the lethargic gopher turtles.

Another mystery bird is the small gray one with a breast of the most delicate yellow imaginable. There is also a pale wash of that same color on the back of his head. Like the cardinal, this one too has a bland and indistinctive voice. Or perhaps he’s never been inclined to sing around me and my chair.

As for the blue jay, the one I call an obstreperous delinquent, his visits are more than anything else an in-air collision that rocks the feeder and sends birdseed spilling to the ground, which I suppose is a favor to the feeder-shy doves down below. Woodpeckers knock around in the camphor tree from time to time but don’t bother with free seed. And once in a while another of the fierce marsh hawks can be seen perched on a fencepost eyeing the terrain. Often eighteen inches from claw to crown, these birds rake the air with a strident screech, a good match with the murderous claws and downward curving beak.

Rising heat pushes the birds off to cooler shadows and I’m left with the smaller inhabitants for entertainment. Creeping across the screen, eye out for small insects is one of the countless lizards that are usually a part of anywhere you turn your head. These tiny anoles (chameleons) often lay their eggs somewhere around the inside of the porch and every other day has me chasing down a one-inch baby to transplant outside.

Farina the dawg bursts each day upon the backyard scene not long after sunrise, desperate to catch one of the invading squirrels launching themselves at the bird feeder. Her appearance is the long established signal for them to scat. Until dark the safest place for squirrels is high in the treetops, far from sixty pounds of dog that casually leaps two feet into the air.

This is one of those times when the summer heat makes the back porch uncomfortable despite the ceiling fan and the familiar coziness of the big old chair. All the surrounding green and the shadows it casts are pretty much helpless against the heat and humidity of a Florida summer.

Birdland

Been keeping an eye on the sitting redbird in the Queen Palm these past eleven days, checking at least two times each day to see what was going on with mama and her three eggs. She couldn’t have been away from the nest more than two or three times in that stretch of days. I can remember only two times she wasn’t there when I crept close to have a look. I sort of lost count of the days since I first discovered the eggs and was beginning to think they were overdue for hatching. No such thing because when I looked this morning I found no mama but three newly hatched, wrinkled and brownish-pink hatchlings curled up in a ball. I say three but it’s a little hard to tell if that small mass in the nest is two or three babies. And today being the eleventh day since I first saw the eggs, they are right on time, hatching just when the expert said they would.

I’ve seen the mother and her mate fluttering in and out and around the nest several times today and I’m guessing they are bringing insects for the baby birds to eat. From the look of the babies you’d think they would have to force feed them for the time being. They look pretty inert there in the bottom of the nest. I understand that their food at this stage is exclusively insects because of the higher protein needed to sustain their accelerated growth rate while so young. Once they fledge they will begin to feed on seeds, fruits and berries. They won’t have far to go to reach the feeder hanging from my camphor tree full of  Black-oil Sunflower seeds.

Cardinal Eggs

My down the road neighbor, Lamar has asked a couple of times if I’ve found any bird nests in trees or shrubs around the yard, this being the season when birds build nests and lay their eggs. A couple of times I’ve told him, “No, haven’t seen any so far.” Maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough because this morning I stumbled upon a mama redbird sitting in her nest about five feet off the ground. Stumbled is a good word in this case because I was taken by surprise, the last thing on my mind a bird sitting on her eggs. I was cleaning up the patch of papyrus stalks that grow about a dozen feet from the back porch and my eye caught sight of the bird’s nest wedged up in the fronds of a Queen Palm close to the papyrus. I looked more closely and saw a rounded reddish-brown mass nestled down in the nest but still didn’t recognize it as a bird. It looked a little like a decaying flower and when I tugged one of the palm fronds out of the way, instantly the “decaying flower” fluttered up and away revealing 3 gray-brown eggs with dark spots.

The red arrow points to the location of the nest.

 

Male left, female right

Something about the discovery made me almost joyous for a few minutes but then I quickly worried I might have scared the mother away for good. The worry didn’t last long because I tiptoed back for another look a half hour later and there was the mother once more roosting atop the eggs. It’s good to know that I now have ahead of me a daily look at or into the nest to see how the hatching is coming along. Looking it up, I see that a female cardinal lays from 1 to 5 eggs, usually 3 which hatch after 11-13 days of incubation. The female broods the chicks for the first 2 days with both parents feeding them a diet of insects. The chicks normally begin leaving the nest 7 to 13 days after hatching, more commonly 9 to 10 days. The parents continue to feed the chicks for as long as 25 to 56 days after they fledge from the nest. The young birds then join flocks of other juveniles and may begin breeding the next spring.

With me temporarily fascinated by the bird nest, Farina is left to her own devices.

Dawg Seat

Farina has never liked riding in the front seat of the truck. For most of the past year she’s been complaining about her place in the back seat. Can’t blame her for whining and pacing back and forth in a space too small for her sixty pounds and too uneven to give her secure footing. I’m sure anyone, dog or hobbit would be uncomfortable in that narrow space designed more for stowing stuff you don’t want to haul in the truck bed. And for a dog that loves to put her head out in the rushing air, side windows that don’t open are another bummer. At least she has the small window in back that opens.

Since she goes almost everywhere with me, I’ve worried that the narrow back seat with its equally narrow leg well could prove a dangerous trap for Farina under certain circumstances. Reason is, Farina has seizures at intervals of about once a month, a brief but definitely scary situation for both of us. For two or three minutes the dog is thrashing on the floor with foam and saliva pouring out of her mouth. I often worried that if it happened in the truck, she might fall down into the leg well on her back and choke on all that gunk boiling up out of her throat. So I thought about ways to prevent that from happening.

I figured the main point was to close that leg well gap and at the same time widen the bench seat. Why not fit a piece of half-inch plywood over the seat and the leg well? I took my idea to neighbor Randy—the one with all the skills and all the tools. We talked about cut outs in the plywood to fit around the curve of the two front seats and the armrest box between, figured out how to do the two supporting legs in the well and how to pad the surface to make it more comfortable. I went off to Home Depot with scribbled measurements and bought half a sheet of plywood and an eight-foot 2x4.

Like always, Randy did all the work with me trying to help out in small ways. He told me he loved doing this kind of job but really enjoyed working alone. Said he could concentrate on the job better that way. So I left him with his saws and sandpaper and with vacuum, brushes and lint roller I worked at cleaning out as much of the dog hair as possible from that back seat. It didn’t take Randy more than an hour to finish the job. I helped him fit it in behind the front seats and then he tacked down the canvas cover over the custom fit padded bench. We stood back looking at it for a bit then both wondered how Farina was going to handle the jump up onto the bench. Her footwork would have to take into account the covered leg well. She was sleeping over on the apron of Randy’s garage and I called her over to the truck. She looked up at the new arrangement; I said, “Get up!” and in one smooth movement she was up and in, standing with paws on the armrest between the front seats looking out the front. She seemed to be thinking, “Where’re we going?”

I ride a lot easier in the truck now knowing that Farina will be okay should one of those seizures come to call. In the past six weeks the vet has gotten the dosage of her medication to what seems like a good balance. The interval between seizures is lengthening. 

    

Old Lawn Mowers

Was a time when I had little knowledge of or use for things like lawn mowers and weed eaters. That’s no longer the case out here in the country where concrete or paving is minimal and where grass and weeds can grow an inch overnight. I have about two acres of it to subdue every ten days at this time of year and it’s a season when you don’t want to be without a means of keeping all that grass low to discourage the snakes from crossing the fence. Didn’t take me long to learn that tall grass and weeds make an attractive environment for things that slither. My problem from the beginning has been with old and well-worn lawn mowers that have more ailments than a 12-year-old Ford Pinto. I could fill a notebook with all the different mechanical problems plaguing my old lawn mowers. Everything from rusted spark plugs frozen in place to the loss of brakes and steering, you name it, I’ve seen it on those two old antiques.

Last week I went out to crank the Landmaster for a hour or two of mowing and got no response when I turned the key. Not even a cough or the sound of a low battery. That happened not long after three or four other problems that cost me money and left the grass growing high. I have a good neighbor who is at home with his hands inside of motors, so I asked him to have a look at the problem this time. He played with it and got the mower started by pressing a screwdriver against the ignition switch (or something) under the hood. So I managed to get the grass cut that day but decided halfway through I was done with old, played out lawn mowers, that I would look around for a newer machine with a reputable brand and not twelve years old. Things aren’t bad enough yet that I’m going off to Home Depot for a brand new lawn mower tagged at $2000.

Maybe I was lucky to find somebody selling a Husqvarna 23 horsepower mower with a 48-inch deck and only a few years old. (The 48-inch deck means it cuts that width in one pass.) The mower also came newly greased, with new blades and new battery and a warranty. And a big extra for me: free delivery and a discount for giving him the old battered Landmaster. I looked at the Husqvarna website online and got all the specifics so I could at least sound knowledgeable in talking to the guy when he delivered. Otherwise he might try to explain the hydrostatic transmission and see the duh on my face. 

For all the problems I’ve had with previous lawn mowers there’s a repairman not far from here who has served me well. Over the past year he’s tried to convince me that buying gasoline without ethanol for the lawnmower will increase the machine’s longevity. It costs a little more and the closest place to get it is 20 miles away but I’ve made up my mind to start using the no-ethanol gasoline in the “new” Husqvarna. I’ll try almost anything to have the peace of mind that comes with not worrying if the lawn mower is going to start when I want to cut the grass.

The Smell of Cedar

Walking out into the front yard this morning the first thing that grabbed my attention was the smell of cedar. The scent was strong and I thought, “What a great aftereffect to cap an hour of hard work.” A week ago I thought the large dead tree in front yard was a pine tree, information I’d gotten from someone who had their trees mixed up. 

The fact that the big dead tree was a cedar and not pine became obvious with the first cut from a chainsaw, with sawdust spewing out rich with the smell of cedar. The day to cut down the tree was set for yesterday and planned as a three man job but suddenly there were six people, all neighbors coming over to help out. I’ve often said that living out here in the dirt road country of southern Oak Hill has taught me the real meaning of neighborliness. Once that tree was on the ground, it took no more than forty-five minutes to have it stripped of branches, cut into manageable pieces, hauled away and the ground raked clean. The tree’s trunk was eighteen inches across and at its highest about twenty-seven feet. With the yard cleaned up and offering a whole new perspective, my neighbors stood around chatting for a while and then one by one drifted home. 

Scroll down to the March 11 post here and you can see a snap of the tree as it was before being cut down. All that remains now is an eighteen inch tall stump which I have begun sealing as best I can with repeated coats of spar urethane on the cut surface, giving it a clear semi-gloss coating to protect it from rain, moisture and temperature. It will soon be the perfect place to sit out in the yard.

The yard is now open to more sunlight with an improved view looking toward the southwest. Big improvement in the balance of the yard in the opinion of everyone standing around. Besides that, a tall dead tree is not a pretty sight from any angle. Tomorrow good neighbor Randy and I plan to cut one of the branches with a two or three inch diameter into inch thick slices to toss in clothes drawers. Buy the same thing all wrapped up pretty at Bed Bath & Beyond and spend $25 or more.