Australia on My Mind

I have always wanted to go to Australia. Any country that has animals with names like bandicoot, numbat, wallaroo, tasmanian devil, hairy-nosed wombat, and squelching froglet clearly must be seen to be believed. (Seeing pictures on Facebook of relatives frolicking on sunny shores Down Under is a bit of an inspiration, too.)

Taking a Qantas leap to Australia is not, however, in the budgetary cards anytime soon, so I'll have to content myself with reading about the place, which for some reason has been happening all winter as one book has inspired the reading of another in domino fashion.

It started when I was nosing around online to see if I could get a DVD of the movie Phar Lap for the Resident Teen. Phar Lap was a magnificent Australian racehorse who raced during the early years of the Depression and died under mysterious circumstances after coming to the United States.

This research caused me to disappear down the rabbit hole of Google to find out more about Phar Lap when I was supposed to be doing other things.

I started getting giddy notions of purchasing various and sundry books but sternly reminded myself that I was already guilty of tracking down books online, receiving them with glee, then stockpiling them for future reading, and that perhaps I should read some of those books first before taking up with other titles.

The Christmas season seemed a perfect time to curl up with some fiction. (Why do we curl up with books and nothing else, I wonder?) So I pulled down the stack of books by Australian author Elyne Mitchell that I'd ordered for the Resident Teen back when she was the Resident Horse-Crazy Girl.

Elyne Mitchell's best-known works are her stories about Australia's wild horses, called brumbies. The movie The Silver Stallion, starring a young Russell Crowe, is based on her beloved series about Thowra, the Silver Brumby. The series kicks off with this horse's birth in The Silver Brumby, continues with four more books featuring this horse, his mares, and his offspring's adventures, and canters off into the sunset through a number of follow-up titles about the horses in his range.

Mitchell wrote the stories from the horses' point of view, complete with dialogue--not an easy style to pull off when you're trying to make your animals believable as animals even as they give voice to their thoughts.

But she does it very well. The animals are all far more clever and deep-thinking than their real-life counterparts ever could be, which can make a jaded adult reader raise an eyebrow, but if you are still a horse-crazy girl inside, and if you can suspend disbelief enough to read them as twentieth-century legends (with the whole "horse kingdom" aspect of the Australian mountain ranges being something like an equine Olympus in these books), they're a lot of fun to read. (And I would venture to say they're the only books I'll ever read that contain the phrase "Venerable Wombat.")

The movie (called The Silver Brumby in Australia) blends the first book in the series with bits of the author's life. Mitchell created the stories for her own children's entertainment and education. She stocked them not only with horses and adventure but also lush depictions of the flora, fauna, and geography of Australia. In the film, the horse's story unfolds as an ongoing narrative being created by the author for her daughter.

It's kind of funny to see the original video-box cover for the film, which features the horse front and center and also gives prime seating to the actresses portraying the author and her girl--

and compare it to the one that came after Russell Crowe rocketed to stardom:

Crowe was still a gangly youth when Australian author Miles Franklin's book My Brilliant Career became a film in 1979. Franklin wrote the book as a teenager, and it was published in 1901. The movie popped out of my memory after I'd finished up the brumby books and had the words "Australian" and "icon" etched in my mind.

My Brilliant Career was based on Franklin's life and is often referred to as "semi-autobiographical." It became wildly popular across Australia when it was published and remains a source of pride today. Franklin herself was a determined, strong person and an ardent feminist. The girl in her story rebels and fulminates against the repression of women and their role in Australian society.

Franklin followed up by writing My Career Goes Bung (published in the U.S. as "End of My Career"), in which the semi-autobiographical character endures post-publication trials involving having published My Brilliant Career. (My head spun a bit as it tried to keep this all straight: "OK, so the first book features a girl named Sybylla and tells her story, but the second  book is about Sybylla and none of what happened in the first book really happened to Sybylla, it was just a story that Sybylla made up and published and in this book she's dealing with the fallout.")

In real life, Franklin's second semi-autobiographical book was not well received by publishers, and so was not published until 1946. (She meets with one of the most damning rejection letters I've ever heard of: one editor who was an early champion of her work responds with a note that begins "You've made me jolly glad I didn't meet you...not even 200% would induce me to publish.")

I found Sybylla fascinating, but a bit tiresome at times, in the first book. I liked her quite a lot in the second one, though, in which she lets fly with some great insults, such as "You conceited lord of creation!" and "old frogabollow" and "feeble nauseating creepers" and "flap-eared weakling." (She tosses in a great word, too, that I haven't turned up anything on by googling: "There was no end to the annoyance caused by that feraboraceous book.")

Sybylla also recounts her wild experiences riding horses in this book. (My husband, in the first year of our relationship, accused me of planning vacations in such a way as to always include horses at every stop. But I cannot help it that horses somehow come to the fore in almost everything I pick up to read. The world truly does revolve around horses, you see.) Here is Sybylla/Miles on being an equestrienne:

"There was one great recreation open to me, even at Possum Gully, which was a sop to energy. I could ride. I could ride tremendously. I loved horses and seemed to become part of them. In the district were any number of good horses, most of them owned by bachelors. As one of these bachelors said, 'A lovely high-spirited girl is just the thing to top off a good horse.' All kinds of horses, from racing stallions to hunting mares, were brought to me with the owners included as escorts and the source of chocolates in wonderful boxes."

Franklin really did rampage on horseback as a girl in her actual life, not just her semi-autobiography. She grew up in a valley called Brindabella and started riding as an infant, recalling that "the rhythm of horses came to me earlier than walking." According to the introduction of one edition of My Brilliant Career, she was known throughout the valley as "a precociously fearless and accomplished rider."

She brought an equally fearless attitude to the rest of her life, going on to work as a nurse, travel and live in the United States, publish novels, speak out as a feminist, and endow a literary award that is still granted in Australia today.

I am pretty sure that, after reading the first five of the Silver Brumby books, I don't feel the need to devour the rest of that series, but I'm pretty eager to get my hands on Franklin's actual biography, a memoir of her first ten years called Childhood at Brindabella, as well as some of her other works. I wonder what snippet in them will then point the way to the next book or topic of interest, quite likely one that has absolutely nothing to do with Australia.

The Stupid Things That Scare Horses

The Resident Teen's horse, Avi, is a big, sturdy boy. About 1,100 pounds, 16.2 hands high (66 inches tall at the top of the shoulders), and plenty of muscle. He has big, brave steeds in his ancestry, such as Secretariat and Native Dancer. (This is not a brag. Look in any Thoroughbred's ancestry and you'll find famous racehorses in it. It's called inbreeding. But they're still big, brave steeds.)

He has galloped down the homestretch (once to win, once to lose) in front of loud, surging racetrack crowds.

But like just about any horse, he's wired to react first and think about it later. Which makes sense. If you're a prey animal, and you decide to stop and ponder, "Is that thing I see out of the corner of my eye a panther stalking me, or is it merely a Doritos bag skipping along in the breeze?" it might be the last thing you ever think, if indeed it is a lion. Bingo! You disappear from the gene pool.

Excellent instinct, certainly. Even the fear of a puddle (which might be a bottomless pit) or an expanse of shade (see: bottomless pit) makes sense in the context of survival. (And plenty of humans meet their doom because their sense of survival has been occluded by--take your pick--adolescent sense of immortality, delusions of grandeur, general recklessness, cluelessness, ignorance...fill in the blank. A horse would have good reason to marvel, regarding humans: "Seriously? You went and picked up that rattlesnake on a dare??")

Still. That doesn't mean the list of things that horses spook at isn't legion and absurd. A brief fossicking online yields personal stories of horses that have spooked at a plastic Santa, a mailbox, a butterfly, a baby rabbit, another horse lying down for a nap, a leaf on the ground (as if leaves aren't, like, everywhere), and a nun (OK, as a former Catholic schoolgirl, this I understand).

Which leads us back to Avi, whom the Resident Teen had to lead home one day because the sound of children on a playground gave him the vapors, forcing her to give up on a trail ride that day. A trail that, of course, contains other horrors just waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting horse and tear it to shreds, such as the following (info drawn from recent, actually accomplished trail rides; viewer discretion advised):

The Blue Chair (of doom)

The Small Sign (of death)

The Swingset of Terror (and carnage)

...and...

The Horrible Hen of Horror

There is truth to the oft-repeated reply to the question, "What do horses spook at?":

Everything that moves, and everything that doesn't.

Of Comfort, Cookies, and Casseroles

The most frightening phone calls tend to come in the dead of night, ripping you out of the cradle of sleep and dropping you on the floor.

The effect is only slightly less jarring when the phone call comes in early evening, because at least you're awake, but there is still the same sensation of life-as-you-know-it falling overboard.

Never mind that, in the end, everything turned out to be fine, and nobody is sick or in hospital, and life went on pretty much as before. For that moment, when you see an unfamiliar number on your phone and answer it and it's your husband and he starts by saying "I'm fine, there is nothing to worry about, but..." and reveals that he went into the emergency room a few hours earlier with chest pains and has to stay overnight for observation, your vision suddenly narrows to a pinpoint and sounds are muffled and the world seems to be contained within a bubble made of the thinnest glass, ready to shatter at the slightest motion.

Most likely the cause of this event was stress ("only" stress), of which there has been an abundance this year. Everybody gets a serving of this time and again in the feast of life.

And that's where the comfort, cookies, and casseroles come in, brought by friends and family who assemble like firefighters in an old movie with a big tarp stretched out between them, ready to catch you when you jump out of the top story of a blazing building.

When my family was gathered at the hospital for several days a few years ago, existing in that strange timeless place one inhabits when a loved one is in the ICU on the threshold of death, friends stepped in, unbidden, to relieve us of all responsibilities for everyday tasks. A friend with a key to our house made sure the dog got let out, walked, and fed. The child was picked up from school, fed, and cared for. The refrigerator seemed to fill up magically with food, with casseroles and other dishes that needed only to be reheated. Mail was collected and milk taken in.

Coming home after each exhausting marathon of anxiety and despair in that time was like starring in a production of "The Tailor of Gloucester," in which the desperately poor and worried tailor, sick and feverish, takes to his bed knowing that he will never be able to finish making a wedding coat for the mayor by morning and will therefore be ruined, only to wake up and find the coat exquisitely completed thanks to the hard work of an army of grateful mice who toiled all night, unseen.

Though this most recent event was short-lived (and hopefully just a wake-up call and not a general alarm), the firefighters that are friends and family immediately began to stir. Siblings called to let me know they were on hand for anything. Two friends appeared in the ER with homemade meals and treats to take home with us so we wouldn't have to worry about a thing. Other friends weighed in on social media and via email with advice, shared experiences, and concern.

The custom of showing up with a casserole may seem sort of quaint and funny to people who are still in the immortal stage of life, but when the going gets rough, it's immensely reassuring to have someone show up with one, even if it's just tuna wiggle. "Food has the power to heal, to comfort, and to convey care and affection," writes chef Joyce Goldstein in her introduction to the cookbook From Our House to Yours, which was published to benefit San Francisco's Meals on Wheels program.

I certainly don't mean to infer that the bringing of food is appreciated only in dark times. Having meals show up when you're taking care of a brand-new baby is a lifesaver, too. (And anybody who wants to bring me food when absolutely nothing of any importance is going on is quite welcome to do so.)

One of my favorite casserole scenes appears in  Lars and the Real Girl. Lars sits in the living room, tensely waiting for news about his beloved Bianca. Women show up with knitting and sewing projects to sit quietly with him. "We brought casseroles," says one. Lars thanks her and wonders aloud if he should be doing something. He's told, "No, dear. You eat." Another chimes in, "We came over to sit." A third woman adds, "That's what people do when tragedy strikes."

Tragedy, however, didn't get us this time, and we went on to have a perfectly lovely weekend, complete with a lazy morning cup of coffee and a sunny-afternoon walk on the Tolt Pipeline trail. With plenty of warm minestrone soup and garlic bread to come home too, and a pot of lentil sausage soup to look forward to (the chocolate chip cookies are already pretty much history).

We've done our share of providing comfort food, too, and life being what it is, will no doubt be on both the giving and receiving end of this tradition many times in the future. As Garrison Keillor says regarding living a good life, "do your part, and bring a hot dish when it's your turn."

This and That and Stuff

A lazy blog post featuring random signs spotted in the past few weeks.

You are not allowed to walk upside down
or defy gravity in this zone.

Quite right. There are, indeed, no children in this basket.

A right-neighborly sort of person
here in Cottage Lake.

I love how astonished even a faceless icon
can appear. A masterful job
on the part of the illustrator!

I might put this on my car even
though I don't have any  reptiles.

People rinse their feet in the dog bowl? Why? Why?
(Not that my dog would care.)

Words to the wise.

Noobles are worth their weight in rubles.

First Bird of the Year 2014: The Spotted Towhee

I gingerly drew open the shades on the morning of January 1, 2014, hoping that the First Bird of the Year would be something a little out of the ordinary. So I was very pleased to find that it was one of the birds we commonly see now that we live closer to the countryside--the feisty Spotted Towhee.

This species is an excellent bird in so many ways. For starters, it's just fun to say Spotted Towhee. (Admittedly, it was even more fun to say Rufous-sided Towhee back in the day when this bird was lumped together with its eastern cousin, now known quite boringly as Eastern Towhee. But nobody has asked me to take over the job of Official Namer of Birds, so I'm afraid Eastern Towhee is official.)

Adult Spotted Towhees also have fierce, blood-red eyes. Which are just the perfect touch for their absolutely outraged expressions. They are the original Angry Birds.

All the birds shown in this post were photographed through our back window as they visited our feeders.

The towhee's plumage is yet another big plus. The male is crisply attired in a black coat and hood speckled with white dots over a chestnut vest and white bib. (The female is, as usual in the bird world, more subtly dressed.) He really stands out when winter has turned the landscape tan and gray. He looks like he's been drawn with bold felt-tip markers on a watercolor background.

The word "towhee" is imitative in origin, though you wouldn't know it from listening to this western species; it's the Eastern Towhee who clearly says "toe-hee." Two other names for towhees based on this call note are chewink and jo-ree.

The Eastern Towhee also distinctly warbles "drink your TEA" when he sings in springtime. But others have heard the tune differently. Thoreau rendered it as "hip you, he-he-he-he." Nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton claimed the bird called "chuck-burr" and sang "pil-a-willa-will-awill."

The modern Sibley field guide says the eastern species sings "jink denk teeee" while the western species trills a Russian-looking "chzchzchzchzchz." To the ears of the nineteenth-century naturalist Thomas Nuttall, towhees called "par par" or "pay payay" and sang in a "monotonous and quaint warble."

No self-respecting female towhee would respond to any of these fellows no matter what they sang, so it's good that at least the towhees know what they're saying. Especially since our western Spotted Towhees don't enunciate the way their eastern kinfolk do. Here, the towhee's call is more of a rasping, catlike buzz, the song a truncated, trilled version of the lyric "drink your tea."

Despite all this chatter about chirps, the sound that's most likely to alert you to the presence of a towhee is the rustling of dry leaves as it scratches for food. A towhee typically sticks to low shrubs and the ground as it hunts for seeds, berries, insects, and other tidbits. It turns up hidden food with a quick one-two step in which it hops forward with both feet then immediately hops backward with its toes scraping the ground. The motion is a bit like doing the hokey-pokey while at a salad bar.

The towhee's ground-hugging, leaf-litter lifestyle has earned it names such as turkey sparrow, ground robin, and low-ground Stephen (and if I ever figure out where "low-ground Stephen" could possibly have originated, you will be the first to know).

In the 1920s, ornithologist William Leon Dawson lauded the towhee's lurking ways with some wonderfully purple prose: ""The Spotted Towhee bulks large in the economy of the underworld. He is, in fact, its acknowledged prince; not of course in the Mephistophelian sense, but as the undoubted aristocrat among those humble folk who skulk under dark ferns, thread marvelous mazes of interlacing sticks and stalks, sort over the leafy wastage of the careless trees, and understand the foundations of things generally."

The Spotted Towhees who visit our feeders don't appear to have read a single word of Dawson's tome, nor do they stick to the script of field guides. They boldly gobble up sunflower seeds in the wide-open spaces under the feeder, where seeds fall as the untidy house finches rummage and squabble. They peck and scratch beneath the suet feeder, too. But they also readily land on the feeders themselves, clutching the wire frames with their reptilian feet and flapping as needed to maintain their balance as they eat.

If they see you watching them, they don't scamper off to hide shyly in the undergrowth--they glare back with those glowing red eyes, looking as if they're seething with incomparable rage.

I can't find any folklore or proverbs associated with these birds, so I'll have to figure out for myself what seeing them augurs for the new year. Maybe it's "don't believe everything you read." Or maybe it's "don't always skulk out of sight--be bold and step into the limelight!"

Or maybe it's just "drink your tea."

Solstice Rambles

It has been a long and emotionally wrenching year. Our most fervent hope is that, just as the shortest day of the year comes to a close and the hours of daylight gradually increase, life follows suit and brightens a bit more each week.

With that thought in mind, we decided to chuck all responsibilities while the Resident Teen was out of town with a friend's family, enjoying a snowy getaway up near the border, and just go wandering in our new neck of the woods.

But you know what they say about mice and their best laid plans. At first, Things Were Not Cooperating. We'd planned to center our outing on a visit to Sliders Cafe in Carnation, where Tony would bring his banjo and enjoy a bluegrass jam.

However, this goal was thwarted by the fact that, despite a chock-full calendar of events on the cafe's website, the forbidding news that it was closing down (which we'd learned a few weeks ago) came true, and instead of the bluegrass jam, yesterday was actually the Big Move-Out Day. Showing up with a banjo would've been just silly.

We decided to haul the dog with us and go for a walk in the Carnation area anyway, though I think partly the resident Banjo Player wanted to see for himself that Sliders actually was closed. Driving past the darkened building without a name on it anymore was a pretty good clue that it was.

"Hey, why don't we go to Remlinger Farms and get a pie for later?" suggested the disappointed musician. So we headed east, driving a route we took many times when the Resident Teen was a little one and a farm park with ponies, old-fashioned sweet rides, a fire truck to climb on, and baby goats to pet--with the promise of an ice cream cone before going home--was all that happiness required.

We knew the park would be closed, but thought perhaps the big produce and gift store would be open. We were wrong. No pie for us.

Well, at least we could go for a walk. Or could we? The first two pull-outs on the main road demanded that we have a Discover Pass to park there and set foot on the trail. Lacking said pass, we pushed farther south. And there we discovered a little gem that made all the dead-ends worth while: Tolt Macdonald Park and Campground.

The dog bounded out of the car (as much as she could bound with a leash around her neck) and nearly hyperventilated snuffing up all the rich new smells as we followed a path along the Tolt River. The river, roaring thunderously, galloped along like a herd of mustangs.

We hadn't walked for five minutes before we  heard the creaking cry of a bald eagle. It settled in a tree just ahead of us on the trail.

Across the river, its mate perched  near the enormous nest the two had maintained for years. Another walker told us they'd raised an eaglet there last year and she'd come every day to see the story unfold.

Another bit of walking took us to a curve in the trail where the Tolt joined forces with the Snoqualmie River. A suspension bridge over the roiling waters led to a lush green campground complete with yurts.

A cheerful sign warned us of the usual dangers to expect (oh, you know, little things like cougars and bears), but the only perils present were a pair of off-leash Doberman pinschers. I think Luna would've preferred the cougars and bears to the investigation she got from the Dobies.

As it was, she didn't appreciate walking across slats and having to spread her webbed Labrador toes wide, so she carefully walked like a trapeze artist on the little wooden "sidewalk" that ran down the middle of the bridge to facilitate rolling wheelbarrows full of camping gear across the river.

Finally, the low-lying white strips of cloud sank to ground level, creating that particularly Northwest variety of snow-globe-style drizzle.

Wet and muddy, we returned to the car, drove home, tidied up, and went out again, this time to Willows Lodge for an evening by a roaring fire complete with a glass of wine, a plate of antipasti, and thumping good music played by a young acoustic guitarist and his drum-playing friend. Christmas lights twinkled inside and out, laughing at the darkness of the longest night.

Winter Walks, Cottage Lake

"17 degrees," read the dashboard thermometer in the car, which meant the street surface a few feet down from that thermometer was actually several degrees colder.

A morning made for black ice, and indeed many road signs in the area warn "Watch for ice."

A mass of Arctic air lumbering into the Puget Sound region this past week brought the first killing frost along with the icy roads and encrusted windshields.

White crystals have outlined leaves and blades of grass in shady spots, fooling one into thinking it's snowed.

Before the cold snap hit, I took a walk to Bassett Pond to take in the lovely hay-and-smoke coloring of the leafless branches and the beauty of the white-trunked birches with their tracery of dark twigs. A few days later, the pond had frozen over and the last of the bright green mosses and ferns had faded into mushy clumps.

 Strands of Methuselah's Beard Lichen (tentative identification)

Bracken, already brown and crisp while many native ferns are still glossy green

Bassett Pond, late November

Bassett Pond, late November

A blaze of redtwig dogwoods  

Labradorus woofus in its natural habitat 

Fungus called Witch's Butter with moss

Bassett Pond, frozen

Close-up of frozen pond and its contents