FOG FANCIER

A fog which formed and disappeared within the space of five

minutes a few evenings ago, right at dark

—hence the bluish light.

Since moving to this riverbank, I've become something of a fog connoisseur—that is, I've learned to recognize and appreciate fogs in all their diversity. I'm not just talking the difference between wispy-thin fogs and pea-soup-thick fogs, either. I mean a whole gamut—distinct, dissimilar, ranging in density, apparent color, height, and duration, to name just a few variables.

Does that surprise you, strike you as odd—the notion that not all fogs are alike?

At the most basic definition level, fog is simply a massing of tiny water droplets suspended in the air near the ground. Technically, the only difference between fog, mist, and haze is that fog is denser; the only difference between fog and a cloud is that fog is simply a cloud that touches the ground or, say, the tops of trees. Weather specialists differentiate between fog, mist, and haze on a scale of density based on visibility, plus the difference between mist and haze also compares relative humidity.

Dawn three mornings ago, looking up the hill

toward my neighbor's yard.

Yeah, I know, this scientific hair-splitting is about as interesting as watching eggs coddle. I'm not even going to mention such yawn-inducing matters as condensation nuclei, hygroscopic particles, or thermal radiation. Suffice it to say that most fogs, mists, hazes, and clouds form when the relative humidity is at or near 100 percent. Moisture (humidity) gets added to already damp air, or the air or water suddenly changes temperature—all this revolving around the dew point. Okay, no more weather jargon, I promise.

What I find interesting—and most enjoy—is the look of the fog/mist itself, and the way it changes my view of an otherwise familiar landscape. This has partly to do with how thick or thin the fog is, how high up from the ground or water it extends, and whatever light might happen to be shining through.

The island across from the cottage yesterday morning.

Some fogs are so dense it's like being surrounded by a soggy gray blanket. I can't see the island across from the cottage, and once or twice haven't been able to see the big box elder a dozen feet beyond the front door. Other, thinner fogs only lightly veil the world around. Still other fogs are so thick you think you could walk upon them, completely obliterating whatever is below—usually the surface of the river—yet are only two or three feet high…a puffy, silver-white carpet from bank to bank.

Midday a couple of days ago, when the river

was at it highest; it has since gone down.

Illumination is the real show-stopper. Fogs at dawn might be pink or gold, while those at dusk blue, purple, magenta. The fog might be snowy white, glowing spectrally, like a congregation of ghosts. Or pale yellow-green, like sickly protoplasm in an old 1950s horror flick. I've even seen fogs with swirls of color, caused, I suppose, by the rainbow-like prismatic effects of sunlight shining at the optimum angle through those suspended water droplets.

Some fogs take a long time to form or hang around half the morning; others appear and disappear within a matter of minutes.

Unpredictable, ethereal, spooky, ephemeral, mysterious, mesmerizing. I am indeed a fancier of fogs.

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REMEMBERING FRANK…

I took this photo of Frank in the mid-1980s,

along one of our favorite smallmouth streams.

Frank would have loved this past week, as winter lost its icy grip, snow cover disappeared, and the first wildflowers began splashing bright color amid drab leaf litter along his beloved streambanks. "But don't call it spring just yet," he would have cautioned. Frank knew Ohio weather, having experienced nearly nine decades worth of changing seasons. He always claimed "the frog has to look through the ice twice," and said to not be surprised to see snow on the forsythia blooms before spring finally settled in for good.

I never quite understood the frog business, but I've witnessed numerous times when yellow forsythia blossoms received a mantle of white.

Yesterday marked the first anniversary of my old friend's passing.

Frank was always an early riser, eager to get a jump on the new day. It came as no surprised that he made his final journey well before dawn. As I sat by his bedside—just the two of us in that small room—holding his hand and saying what words of comfort I could, I remember a robin cut loose in the darkness beyond the nursing home's window—a sprightly melody of coming light and burgeoning season, a familiar vernal song Frank would have truly enjoyed. Even in the midst of casting to a productive bass pool, Frank would often pause to listen to a bit of birdsong.

We were best friends for nearly thirty years. I can't begin tell you the countless hours and adventures we shared—but I can tell you we enjoyed almost every moment. And even those times when serious matters brought us together, we found solace in each other's company. The wide gap in our ages didn't matter. Writing, books and bookstores, nature photography, meals shared at country cafés, and puttering along small streams with fly tackle or ultralight gear in search of smallmouth bass, were just a few of our common interests, part of the reason for our strong friendship bond. But most of all, we were kindred spirits…so close in so many ways that we could have been brothers.

Frank was, for most of his professional life, both a Baptist minister and a newspaperman—reporter, columnist, photographer, editor; not a career duo you encounter every day. He was also a serious outdoorsman, a good naturalist, and an expert stream angler.

More than anyone I ever met in regards to Christian living, Frank not only talked-the-talk but invariably walked-the-walk. He loved people, loved life, loved laughing and sharing and having a good time. He was quick-witted, intellectual, extremely well educated, with formidable depth in the classics—both prose and poetry. He never met a stranger, never touted the fact that he was a pastor, and did not want to be called "reverend"—though his theological credentials were staggering. It sometimes took folks well acquainted with him years to make the connection.

Seldom does a day go by that I don't think of my old pal—wish I could call him up, send him an e-mail, or drive out for a day-long visit. What would he say to the fact that one of his favorite streams now hosts eagles? Or that last fall I walked back to the secret pool we used to ply on another, smaller creek…and couldn't bring myself to make the first cast? I know he'd be hot to visit the used book store I recently discovered in a nearby Indiana village. And there's that little café up by Lake St. Marys which serves an all-you-can-eat perch dinner; Frank, a Swede to the bone, loved eating fish as much as he did catching 'em.

Frank taught me much. But most of all he taught me about courage and grace, about following your conscience and your heart, and about making the most of whatever life hands you. I will be in his debt forever. He is not forgotten.

[I've written two other posts—one a poem—about Frank…here and here.]

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RISING WATER AND COMING SPRING

Showers this morning, following a day of light rain yesterday. According to the long-range weather forecast, we'll have rain throughout the rest of the week and weekend. Not too much, I hope, since the river has already risen perhaps five feet from what it was last weekend, and is still coming up. This rise came as the fast-melting snow found it way into the upstream network of ditches and rivulets, brooks and small creeks, and eventually into the river which flows past my cottage—a stream which will carry and dump it into an even larger river, and thence into a third, and finally a fourth—the mighty Mississippi—which will take it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

I don't know why, but whenever I consider this network of streams which runs from the rich black farmland of northwestern Ohio to Louisiana's salty deltas, I'm always amazed to have such a front-row seat. Watersheds were our first highways—the arterial blood of a burgeoning nation; from canoe to flatboat to stern-wheeler, streams carried explorers, traders, families, goods. Most of our first towns were located adjacent to a river. Thinking about "my" river, I see not only the geographic connections, but also the historical.

One bit of good news is that our temperature today is supposed to hit a high of 64˚F…incredible considering not many mornings ago the thermometer read a numbing 16˚F when I went out to replenish the bird feeders at dawn. Moreover, the week's highs are suppose to remain at least in the 50s, which I suppose makes the rain more tolerable, though it doesn't do much for photography and taking walks.

Ahhh-h-h, but isn't spring's coming always about weather? Why should this year be any different?

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SIMPLE MAGIC

Time. Heat. Light.

How simple the formula. And all produced by a few hours of March sunshine.

Yet with these three ingredients comes something wondrous—a splash of color amid the brown leaves that instantly fills the eyes and warms the heart. A flower! Specifically, a purple crocus striped with white. Not just any crocus, mind you, but The Crocus—the premier bloom, the initial flower, the awaited first of its kind of the year.

Whether it's a daffodil or crocus, or something else. It's the first! Is there any garden flower more welcome, more anticipated? Nope, not in my book. There may be yellow winter aconites blooming up the road. Or white snowdrops in a neighbor's rock garden. But this fledgling crocus is special because it is yours—planted by your hand, grown in your soil, a gleaming spring-bright child of your loving labors. A gift of natural magic.

A vernal blessing which gladdens your heart.

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SUNSHINE IN THE SNOW

Nothing warms a winter-weary heart more than the first wildflowers of the new year—especially when those blooms are a jolly egg-yolk yellow, as bright and cheerful as a sudden burst of sunshine. Simple magic, perhaps, but I never fail to feel joyfully renewed when I make my first visit of the new year to a favorite patch of winter anconite and find them decorating their corner of the woods—often surrounded by snow.

That's the setting I found this time around when I walked the snow-covered trail back to their half-acre woodland hideout. I don't know their history—who planted them, or when the first handful of tiny bulbs were slipped gently into the rich woodland humus a stone's throw from the river. It must have been a long time ago, perhaps well before the end of the Nineteenth Century. I've known about this particular patch of winter anconites practically all my life. 

As a boy, I remember accompanying my father to this stretch of riverine woods when he made his earliest-of-the-season angling forays. It was much too early for dependable fishing, but Dad was tired of sitting at his basement workbench tying bass and panfish flies. Cabin fever could not be curtailed by common sense or the threat of frostbite. It was March by the calendar and any angler worthy of the name knew March was a "fishing" month. Excuse aplenty. The yellow flowers were always out when we made that initial trip.

Generally, winter anconites are not usually thought of as wildflowers. They're not natives, but rather naturalized from Asia Minor and Europe. Unlike, say, lesser celandine—another naturalized small yellow flower that's also a member of the buttercup family, which is practically taking over certain streambanks, to the detriment of native species—winter anconites are still found mostly in home gardens. I suspect the plants in this patch are the progeny of anconites planted by someone who had a home nearby—though I've never found any evidence of a farmstead—neither rotting timbers, rusty well pipe, scattered foundation stones, or even a depression in the leaf litter and briar tangles indicating an old cellar hole. 

This morning, the temperature was 16˚F when I fed the birds. It remained below freezing when I decided to take my walk. The ground, in many places, was still covered with snow. No matter. I was being stirred by the same urge that once brought my father out to investigate the seasonal progression. I left my own fly rod in the closet this time around; instead I carried only a camera. But the destination was as familiar as the sound of the cardinals in the thickets, and the purl of water over rocks.

When I rounded the bend I saw, between morning shadows and drifts of snow, patches of leaf-strewn brown earth now spangled with yellow. Ahhh-h! I couldn't help but smile. Somewhere inside a window opened and warm light began to flood my spirit.

Sunshine in the snow. What a gift! Winter anconites, planted long ago, by an unknown gardner, again proclaim the turning season—once more in yellow splendor they lift my heart and whisper their vernal message to my soul.

Thank you!

——————      

PERCHING HERON

It is late, almost six o'clock on a cloudy winter's day. The light is noticeably fading, heading towards dusk which always comes early here in this hill-cupped valley, where the river cuts its slate-blue path and sycamores lean thoughtfully over restless water.

For the past half hour—long enough to eat a bowl of vegetable soup and drink most of a mug of coffee—I've been sitting in the main room, beside the cold hearth, watching the riffle and pool in front of the cottage and the woods on the island beyond. There are a dozen Canada geese cruising along the bank where the water is still. Big birds in formal-looking  black and white and gray attire. Every so often, amid much flapping of wings, they take to honking at one another, like disgruntled drivers caught in a traffic jam.

Just as I'm finishing my drink, a great blue heron comes sailing downstream, twenty feet above the river, and makes a hard right turn at the pool to sweep into island's thick timber. I see the big bird flap once, twice, then angle its glide-path up slightly to land atop a horizontal sycamore limb, exhibiting more lightness and grace than you'd think possible in such a gangly creature. 

Until I moved to this riverside cottage, I had no idea great blue herons spent so much time in trees. I'd visited heron rookeries during nesting time, and watched the great birds come winging into their high nests. Yet other than that, I'm not sure I'd ever noticed a heron in a tree as I wade-fished or float-tripped my way along countless streams. And believe me, I've spent far more time on the water than most folks—even serious angler-types. Now I've come to learn that herons sit in trees every day, sometimes for an hour or more at a stretch; they tree-perch throughout the year, through all seasons and weather; and they sit at all heights above the ground, not necessarily over the water—anywhere from 20 to 100 feet high.

I find this behavior puzzling. Are they simply resting? Taking a time-out for digestion? I have no idea. The herons don't appear to be watching anything, and they're certainly not keeping an eye the river and potential fishing holes. In fact, often when they perch in view of the stream, they sit with their backs to the water. So for now, I'll just chalk it up to up one more nature mystery, part of the growing list of things I don't know. 

But a good excuse to refill my mug and sit a tad longer…

———————

  

SUET THIEF UNMASKED

The saga of the suet thief began about two months ago…

During my daily crack-of-dawn bird-feeding routine, along with topping off the two gallon-sized sunflower seed dispensers, and tossing out scoops of cracked corn for the ground feeders, I make sure the three wire cages I've hung from various trees around the cottage each has at least a portion of suet cake inside for the woodpeckers and others who prefer to their meals to come packed in cholesterol. Even with several daily visits from the pileateds, plus multiple downies, hairies, red-bellieds, and flickers, the trio of suet squares usually lasts three or four days—often longer if the dratted starlings take their rowdy pillages elsewhere.

I buy these suet cakes by the carton, on sale, and thus keep their cost down to a fairly reasonable 65-70¢ each. No, I agree—even then, the cost isn't cheap—not to a frugal Irishman who believes wholeheartedly that money saved is even better than money earned because you don't have to pay taxes on it. It is a measure of my chronic woodpecker infatuation that I regularly peel a few dank bills from the moldy wad in the old Mason canning jar I keep buried beside the rose bush, and fork them over with barely a whimper to the shopkeeper at the hardware store where I buy my avian victuals.

Imagine then how apoplectic I became when those hard-bought suet cakes started disappearing almost nightly! Egads! I screamed to the rising sun…I've been robbed!

And so the battle began.

I've been waging my side of the ongoing campaign with an unseen foe, though I had my suspicions regarding the identity of this nefarious bandit, a thief-in-the-night who prowls by moon and starlight and is brazen, clever, and lucky. Still, I didn't want to malign the whole race; just the dastardly four-legged, ring-tailed individual plunderer.

Some nights I lost only a single cake; other nights it was two.

I began counter measures. At irregular intervals I would make impromptu checks. From barely dark to sometime after midnight, while watching a T.V. show, reading a book, or just sitting by the fireside, I would leap up, grab a flashlight, and dash out the door—hoping to catch the flea-bitten furball in the act. I'd scrutinize feeders, trees, and all surrounding hideouts. Moon the dog would sniff and snuffle, wag, occasionally bark, peer under the deck, scratch, mark a few sites, and give me her verdict…Nope, ain't nothing here, boss.

The insult-to-injury part was that sometimes, between checks, a suet block would be pilfered. Or I'd go to bed with three intact and wake up with only only one left, and it about three-quarters consumed.

Two whole dollars, gone, ka-poof! In a single night! Why, if I were going to be this wasteful of money, I might as well start going to Starbucks and paying $37 for a cup of their gussied-up coffee!

On top of losing suet blocks, I regularly had to employ a long pole to untangle and retrieve the cages and their chains from the high branch where they'd been placed while the hungry thief ate. The hairy freebooter apparently lifted the cage up hand-over-hand, wrapped the chain around a limb, pried the box flap open, and dinned safe, secure, and at leisure. Sometimes I had to drag out the ladder to be able to reach high enough to free the mess.

Then the bugger stole both block and cage! The whole shebang…gone! I looked high and low—well, Moon did much of the really low looking, since the ground was muddy and/or snow covered, and I have a bad back. But the cage had disappeared without a trace.

So I weighted the cages. Apparently this particular animal is the Samson of his clan. Even with a fair-sized rock tied underneath, the cages still ended up in the trees—flaps open, suet missing, chain wrapped around the limb. I had to be careful poking with the pole to keep from knocking the rock weight loose and braining myself senseless.

Short of tying a concrete block underneath, which I thought both aesthetically unsightly, and possibly encouraging to the squirrels to take up some embarrassing form of pole dancing, the only sure way to protect my suet investment was remove the filled cages from their hangers nightly, and store them in the metal trash cans with the sunflower seeds and cracked corn.

This has worked, though it has been a pain in the behind—taking 'em down and putting 'em back up come morning…plus I occasionally forget. The suet thief never forgets. If I leave the blocks out, I lose one or two. (Nope, still haven't found or replaced that missing cage.)

Today, though, I believe I finally caught sight of my opponent. Even managed a quick snapshot, er, mugshot. As coons go, this one is pretty scrawny. I would have felt better about things if he would have been the size of a wolverine or small bear; I hate to think such a wimpish example of Ohio coon-hood could be the culprit, but the swaggering little raccoon showed every sign of being totally familiar with the deck, food storage bins, and layout of the various feeders.

I have no doubt this is the actual perpetrator.

So what did I do? Well, besides watching him make his rounds, nothing. Moon, of course, wanted to get up close and personal. I told her discretion is sometimes the wiser form of valor. I'm not saying that 8-pound coon could have whipped my 60-pound dog…though I've had enough experience with treed and cornered raccoons to know the fight would likely have ended with bloodshed all around. But seeing as how raccoons are notorious carriers of rabies, and even though Moon has had her rabies shot, I didn't want to take the chance.

Besides, this fellow looked gaunt if not starved, and was doubtless driven out and about during the cold of the winter's day by hunger. I've been hungry before myself, wondered about my next meal—so I have some understanding. Frankly, I just didn't have the heart to take more severe measures. We'll continue to conduct our nightly skirmishes—I'll try to remember to put the suet in safekeeping overnight, and Mr. Raccoon will keep checking up on my memory.

And from time to time, I'll expect toss a few extra scraps his way.

———————