Happy Easter
Egg hunt, walk, fabulous brunch. On the down side, Will was a bit sick so he and Katy and Abby and Tony could not be here.
First Day of Summer...
...at least it feels that way. High near 80. Grass growing, buds popping. And our daffodils, under the redbud tree, (not the photo below) wimping out. We have deduced the reason—gopher. Lots of gopher holes all around the patio garden, and a gopher actually sighted several times. Quite sure the gopher is gnawing the bulbs and sapping their strength.
The groundhog trap, previously used, has a wire mesh far too coarse for gophers, so we have ordered a finer trap.
Poison has been ruled out, although a "host of golden daffodils" badly damaged makes one think revenge would be sweet.
Manitowoc and Fox Point
Visit with Aunt Janet and then rollerblading with Katy and Will. also great dinner prepared by Tony and a stirring rendition by Katy of How Far I'll Go, from Moana.
Gasbag
Pontificating blow-hard. Pompous ass. You name it. That's my U.S. House of Representatives rep. Jim Senselessbrenner, who today held a "town hall" at the fire hall in the little, run-down, fly-blown, poverty- stricken, has-been of a town called Helenville, about 15 minutes north of Whitewater.
Less than a dozen "constituents" in attendance. All but one, including my neighbor Phil and me, in opposition. I guess it was a "listening session" if you figure those of us in the peanut gallery were the listeners. Our representative preferred to talk, using threadbare talking points, at high speed in a flat monotone, making sure he was never interrupted.
As he frequently said, "Who's next?"
Buttermilk Grill-Fried Chicken
A first.
Marinated in buttermilk. Then dredged in seasoned flour and fried in a cast iron pan on the Big Green Egg. Rather high up on the goodness scale.
NB: Buttermilk is becoming my secret ingredient—it's a key component of my World Famous Waffles, and now of fried chicken. However, I will never, under any circumstances, eat a waffle-clad chicken sandwich.
Lovely day. Pax and I did the big loop in bright sun, and I was carrying my hat and vest on the homeward leg. The two of us also got in a good bike ride to the prairie, and after that I got in a good solo bike ride, hither and yon, at high speed.
By the time the grill was fired up. clouds had moved in, a wind had come up, and the temperature had dropped. Rain in the forecast again.
Put The Storms Back On
Not really, but it does seem silly to be running the furnace with screens on some of the windows.
Cloudy and chilly. Pax and I took our loop walk in a steady light rain. Damp it all.
On the upside, lots of moisture has descended on the Michigan/Huron basin, and reports are coming in of flooding at various places. Great Lakes water levels must be on the upswing.
Spring Springs Eternal
Warm and summery morning, with conditions actually, and surprisingly, seeming a bit dry. But then, by late afternoon, Pax got antsy, eventually heading to the basement. And then the clouds burst (un-forecast and unexpected). Classic cold front. On the upside, rain following warmth means everything is greening greatly.
The summery forenoon inspired us to swap some storms for screens and to turn off the pilot light on the breezeway stove. Got it all done just in time. And, we are now open to new ideas.
And here is a photo of Abby's front yard. Apparently Fox Point was hit even harder than Whitewater.
Three Dog Nite...
...or rather Three Nite Wackos. In other words, a third Nite has been added to the stable. Now we will have two competitive boats and a tender, all part of a go-fast team.
Afternoon picnic at Victoria Lane, making the most of non-iceboat weather.
Yard Work and Kid Sitting
In Fox Point. Mimi and Katy did lots of sewing.
Compost bins and brush cleaning.
Who is this masked man?
Squill and Scroll
... no that's supposed to be "Quill and Scroll", the high school journalism society, which I used to interact with. But that was then and squill is now, and squill proves that spring has officially arrived.
Today was an outside day, with yard work, walks, and bike rides. Pax got in a great workout, including a dip in the prairie pond, which is now quite an immense body of water.
Lots of Wind
But also some sun. Gale warning and flood warning on Lake Michigan, with 15 to 20 foot seas rolling in to southern shores. Bike ride to the prairie a challenge—uphill and into the blast (but no need to pedal on the way home).
Manitoulin style, but actually in Wisconsin.
Crappy Diem
All day rain. Again.
Steady, sometimes light, sometimes moderate, but adding up. Ground saturated.
Fields—fallow or flooded?
Mimi is making significant progress on her monumental, two-sided tapestry which is to be hung between posts in Kagawong cottage to attenuate the amplitude of SIPs sounds. Not much time left. And it is going to be marvelous.
Early Morning Rain...
... and late morning rain as well. Quite a lot of it, but clearing by afternoon. To Fox Point to see Will and Kate on their return from Texas, and then a brief ride to Manitowoc to check in on Aunt Janet.
Here Will and I are working on a game of Rush Hour (should be called Traffic Jam) in which you have to shuffle vehicles to find a way clear for the ice cream truck.
Clogged Drains and More Rain
Katy called on on April 1 from Rockport to tell me that Uncle John's toilet was backed up, and I believed her. In my defense, I had been pre-conditioned to clogs because of the one occurring in the basement here—utility tubs filling almost to overflowing when the clothes-washer finished its drain cycle. Today, our sprightly, voluble, little, local plumber stopped by with his rodder—and we are once again unplugged. (Always useful info here on this blog.)
Cloudy day in the low 50s, with rain, actually, quite a bit of it right now, causing the dusty sump pump down in the bowels to rewake from time to time. The previous pump wore out from lack of use.
That's it for plumbing, today.
Bob Fest
Ancient, no, longtime, friend, fellow teacher, sailing companion, and all around good guy (also Cub fan and Chief Lemming) turned 70. We were glad to attend the festival.
Hedge Pig...
...among other things. Bri, Ellie, Maddie, and Becca down to Whitewater for the world's greatest waffles. Then a long bike ride, some roller blading, playtime at the playground, and a picnic in the park. Beautiful weather for all that, and a very nice change it was too. Afternoon fun in the back yard where neighbor Bill came over to set up his trap, seeing as how Mimi suspected something was again living under the woodpile. The kids wanted to stay to see if the trap would actually catch anything, but we said that was unlikely in such a short time. But, a short time after the visitors left Mimi and I looked out and saw the trap had been occupied.
We drove porky pig about five miles out of town and resettled him in a lovely wild place by the Crawfish River.
Correction. Not a hedgehog. A ground hog.
Prairie Dog
In spite of the bad weather, Pax and I got in a ride to the prairie, which, after all the rain, is greening up—and would green up a lot more if the temperature would ever go up.
Fun morning in O'wock playing with Maddie and Becca. (Ellie, poor girl, is so old she has to be in school all day. (Mimi spent the night there last night, so she got in some Ellie time.)
All Day Rain
Steady, cold rain rattling the windowpanes. The gutters are gurgling, Pax is bored, and Buddy is reluctant to ramble.
Given the conditions, I decided to write up a review, for the Expositor, of Dan Egan's new book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.
REVIEW
Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
by Jim Nies
- Title: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
- Author: Dan Egan
- Publisher: WW Norton
- Pages 364
- Price $36.95 (CDN)
It’s a grim but gripping story—the new book Death and Life of the Great Lakes, by Dan Egan, a longtime reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Egan, whose beat has been Lake Michigan and the other four big lakes connected to it, has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his Great Lakes reporting.
Two hundred years ago the Great lakes were an astonishing ecological paradise, vast inland seas comprising more than 20% of Earth’s fresh water. They were home to a balanced web of life, fine-tuned over ten or more thousand years, that included sturgeon, pike, musky, perch, bass, whitefish, and lake trout. But, for all their beauty and bounty, the Great Lakes were ecologically naïve, meaning that they had evolved, since the retreat of the glaciers, in isolation from the rest of the world’s aquatic environments.
The first people to settle around the Great Lakes lived in harmony with the natural bounty. But then came European settlement and the view that the Lakes were primarily an exploitable economic resource—apparently limitless fishery, advantageous industrial site, convenient sewer, and watery highway into the heart of a continent.
The map of North America “practically taunted the Unites States and Canada” to try connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes. First, in 1825, came the Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Then in 1829 the Welland Canal, which was built to bypass Niagara Falls. Then, in 1959, the complete St. Lawrence Seaway. All were touted as engineering and economic marvels, sure to bring unprecedented riches to the heartland. Both ended up costing the Great Lakes, and eventually the whole continent, dearly.
Dan Egan calls the Canal and the Seaway the “Front Door,” a door that has let in some truly obnoxious invaders—among them the sea lamprey and the alewife.
In the 1890s the annual commercial lake trout haul on Lake Michigan was more than 8 million pounds, with similar amounts coming out of Lakes Huron and Superior. In the 1940s the annual harvest of trout and whitefish across the Lakes was somewhere around 100 million pounds. Then, with the arrival of the lamprey, native fish populations crashed. By 1960 the whitefish harvest on Lake Michigan was less than 25,000 pounds and the trout harvest was zero.
With lake trout gone, the invading river herring, or alewife, was free to reproduce, and by 1965 it comprised about 90 percent of the fish mass in Lake Michigan. In July, 1967, thirty miles of Illinois shoreline around Chicago was inundated with billions of rotting alewife carcasses, and cleanup required bulldozers and hundreds of million dollars. The whole think stank.
What happened next is fascinating—and therein lies more of Egan’s tale—about what happened to and is still happening with the lamprey and the alewife, and about the lake trout and whitefish. On top of that, there’s the whole up-and-down saga of non-native coho and chinook salmon, and how they got here and what has happened since.
Egan also tells the story of two other invaders, the appalling zebra and quagga mussels, who hitched a ride into the Great Lakes in ocean-going freighter ballast water—creating an extraordinarily expensive and ongoing disaster.
Once he finishes the “Front Door” Egan takes a look at the “Back Door,” the Chicago Sanitary and Ship canal, opened in 1900 to flush the city’s sewage down to the Mississippi and to provide a navigable waterway between the Great Lakes and the continental interior. This back door presents a number of problems; among them a 1.5 billion gallon a day diversion from the Great Lakes, a path for all the invaders who came in the front door to head out to the western half of North America, and a potential entry point for perhaps the most obnoxious invader of all, the Asian carp.
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes also explores two other crucial Great Lakes issues—toxic algae blooms and fluctuating water levels. Lake Erie is North America’s “dead” sea. The thirst for Great Lakes water is great and growing. Dredging combined with erosion in the St. Clair River has opened a huge Michigan/Huron drain.
In some ways The Death and Life of the Great Lakes reads like a crime thriller. It’s a story of greed, shortsightedness, incompetence, and “a deficiency of government.” But good things have happened, too. Egan documents scientific breakthroughs and environmental heroes, “stutter steps [forward} and stumbles backward.”
It may be possible to restore the Great Lakes to some kind of ecological balance and to protect them from myriad threats. But the future remains uncertain. Untreated ballast water can still make it into the Lakes bringing with it the potential for dangerous additions to the already present 186 invasive species. Asian carp are knocking hard on the “back door,” and the Trump administration has slowed if not stopped efforts to strengthen defenses. The St. Clair River continues to roar. Waukesha is the first diversion under the Great Lakes Compact.
Our idea of the Great Lakes does seem to be changing, however—we seem to be moving from a mindset of exploitation to one of restoration and preservation. Egan says:
a “12 year-old, you see, is perhaps the best hope the lakes have to recover from two centuries of over-fishing, over-polluting, and over-prioritizing navigation: almost every person I’ve ever talked to who cares anything about the lakes and the rivers that feed them does so because they have a childhood story about catching the fish that swim in them.”
Those of us who live on or visit the largest freshwater island in the world certainly have many such stories. And we will almost certainly find The Death and Life of The Great Lakes a great read.
Robins and Frogs
Lots of both. Peepers peeping and robins chirping.
And some ducks.
Gray day, with a chilly wind from the north-east. Rain now. All of which leads to thoughts of southern climes.
Back On Home Turf
Pax very enthusiastic about reestablishing his domain in the park and around the block. On top of that, Buddy is here, so we are well set in the dog department.
Cloudy, chily morning, with jacket required, but sunny and pleasant by afternoon. The bicycle found itself washed and lubed—to make up for its long ride in dust and rain. And then there was grocery shopping, seeing as how the cupboard was bare.
There are signs of spring here, but the season is yet more to be anticipated than to be experienced.