Little Kids and a Very Big Horse

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of spending a beautiful sunny Saturday in rural Snohomish at a stable with sweeping views of the Cascade mountains and a lush green valley.

The occasion was a demonstration of equestrian vaulting, the art and sport of gymnastics on horseback with roots that go back to ancient Rome and Greece.

A friend's little girl, a child as petite and lively as a cricket but flexible as a rubber band, was participating in this event aboard a giant of a horse: a Belgian named Curious George.

The vaulters, all associated with a school called Above and Beyond Equestrian Sports, ranged in age from a wee five-year-old wearing butterfly wings to an adult woman.



The vaulters leaped onto the horse and landed lightly, as if the action were no more difficult than playing in  waves.

Fearlessly, they executed twists, turns, stands, and other acrobatics while patient George walked, trotted, and cantered at the behest of his trainer.


At the event's conclusion, George returned, stripped of his surcingle and other gear.

The big horse never moved his massive hooves as children clustered around him, stroking his broad flanks and chest and reaching up to pat his velvety nose. He delighted in nibbling the blond, wispy haylike hair of one small boy, sending him into rivers of giggles.

Clearly this is a horse who revels in attention.


It was a relief to look back on this weekend because unfortunately I'd started the day by reading an article about the horrific abuse endured by Tennessee Walking Horses at the hands of so-called trainers who employ barbaric tactics to make their horses walk like goosestepping Wehrmacht soldiers.

My photos from that beautiful Saturday reminded me that many people honor and cherish the horses who serve them so faithfully and remain mindful of what the Greek writer Xenophon stressed more than 2,300 years ago in his work On Horsemanship:

"What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad...The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals...The majesty of men themselves is best discovered in the graceful handling of such animals."

Marsh Meander at Magnuson, May 2012

Magnuson Park in Seattle was once a Navy airfield. Today, it's the site of a 350-acre park complete with lakefront beaches, grassy hills, sports fields, and many old buildings currently being used as offices or awaiting reconstruction for new purposes. Thankfully, some areas that were once concrete have been recreated as wild lands, including a beautiful marsh that weaves through areas of brush and woodland.

It's hard to believe that the artificial playing-field surface east of it functions as a forest floor, allowing water to percolate gently down to the marsh, but it does. The piping of the Pacific chorus frogs who've made the marsh their home is a testament to that.

We went for a walk through the marsh on a sunny afternoon recently, on one of the first spring days that even hinted that you could take off your jacket and sling it over your shoulder halfway through the hike. But the birds have been reveling in spring for weeks despite the gray skies, as evidenced by all the busy bug-gathering, stick-collecting, and singing going on.

Male gadwall swimming among reeds

Male flicker hunting for ants and other insects in the grass

Male redwing blackbird keeps an eye on his territory

I'm pretty sure this is a savannah sparrow, based on markings and song, plus they're on record as living here. This would be a first sighting for me...yay!

This crow harassed a red-tailed hawk mercilessly, but interestingly nobody came to his assistance...usually crows pour in to mob a predator. Crows are highly intelligent, so we wondered if perhaps all the other crows were thinking, "Oh, that's just our stupid neighbor yelling his head off about harmless old Harry the Hawk, who never goes after anything but rabbits and voles. Just ignore him." The hawk was certainly unimpressed by his heckler.

Evil Horse-Poisoning Invader...or Not?

Ever since the summer of 2010 when I discovered that what I thought was a beautiful and rare orchid growing in my garden was actually a high-priority nonnative invasive weed called Himalayan balsam, a plant that according to state instructions should virtually be locked in an airtight chamber and launched into deep space, I have viewed new plant volunteers popping up in the garden with a jaundiced eye.

The Mystery Plant of 2012

Is that pretty little blossom a native species that sprouted, liked what it saw, and decided to thrive? Or is it a green monster that will overwhelm all my other plants, clamber out of the yard, and lay waste to local habitats, possibly threatening to take over the Pacific Northwest as kudzu has claimed the southeast? Will some sort of secret gardening Polizei discover that my garden was the source of this herbaceous tsunami? I couldn't bear to have all those green thumbs pointing at me accusingly.

So when I noticed plants with cheerful blue flowers and hairy green leaves growing around the young maples near the back fence, I wasn't sure whether to be pleased or concerned. Should I practice "better safe than sorry" and yank them out?

Hmm. I have an embarrassing memory of heroically ripping tall purple blooms out of my first garden during my first year in Seattle, thinking that I was nobly saving wetlands everywhere by ridding the world of the horribly invasive nonnative purple loosestrife. By the following summer, with a year's gardening experience to my credit, I knew that I'd actually destroyed a lovely bed of foxgloves--also not native, but not a wickedly invasive and harmful one.

Forget-me-nots

This year's mystery plant reminded me a lot of a forget-me-not. Small clouds of tiny forget-me-nots drift across my garden, all descendants of a variety purchased at local garden shops.

But this new plant was much bigger, a hefty, fuzzy whorl of leaves nearly as big around as a full-grown small species of hosta. It wasn't until its flowers opened about two weeks ago that it hinted it might be related to the petite forget-me-nots.

Not half an hour after examining the flowers this weekend, on a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon, I sat down with a cup of coffee and a library book called The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock. It tells the story of one Mary Delaney, who invented the art of collage in 1772, at the age of 72, when she began snipping and pasting paper to produce botanically accurate "floral mosaicks." I turned page 35 to find a plant much like my new volunteer staring back at me, as if Mrs. Delaney had returned from the beyond to help identify it.

Her plant was a Hound's Tongue, Omphalodes verna, also known as creeping forget-me-not and Mary Blue-Eyes (and, oddly, the unattractive "creeping navalwort").


Research quickly revealed that my plant was not a creeping forget-me-not, but was likely to be a variety of houndstongue. And...

(dramatic, foreboding music here)

...there's a houndstongue on the Washington State noxious-weed list.

It poisons grazing animals. It produces burr-like seeds that cling viciously to fur, wool, and pants legs and can injure animals' eyes and lips. It contaminates hay. It's supposed to be destroyed. Yikes!

But mercifully: case dismissed. The rotten no-good houndstongue is actually a burgundy-flowered plant of European origin. The flowers in my garden bear a greater resemblance to the Pacific Houndstongue, Cynoglossum grande. So perhaps a really-truly native species found its way into this shady area in my garden and took up housekeeping in that spot because it reminded it of  home.***

Pacific Houndstongue grows in wood and forest fringes from southern British Columbia to central California, so it's in exactly the right place to flourish. The name "houndstongue" was applied to this plant because of its resemblance to its European cousins, whose name in turn was inspired by the shape of the leaves. This probably suggested the "like cures like" belief that the plant could cure rabies caused by dog bite.

Field guide said houndstongue flowers had 5 petals; first one I saw had 6!

Houndstongues and forget-me-nots all belong to the borage family and contain potent alkaloids strong enough to harm the livers of grazing animals (and humans). According to the Audubon Field Guide to North American Flowers, native Americans once used brews made from the root to treat burns and stomachaches; I don't know if the root is less toxic, or if, like any  medicine, a certain amount  aided in healing, with more than that dose causing lethal side-effects.

Another European name for houndstongue is "rats and mice," a reference to the plant's musty smell--or what I guess is a musty smell, because (a) the plant in my yard doesn't seem to smell at all, and (b) I don't know what rats and mice smell like, and my cats aren't saying. One source claims that the leaves and roots can be used to repel rats and mice, so maybe the plant really isn't redolent of rodents and is actually named for its vaunted rodent-repellant powers.

One more rodent reference: The genus of borage plants known as forget-me-nots is called Myosotis, which mean's "mouse's ear" in Greek and refers to the species' fuzzy little leaves. (Wonder if people once used a tisane of forget-me-not leaves to cure rabies caused by being gnawed on by mice.)

Until otherwise notified, I'm going to assume my volunteers are Pacific houndstongues and will allow them to spread freely. Unless it turns out they actually attract rats and mice. Or hounds.

***This just in, as I have been "otherwise notified." Jane Badger of the blog Books, Mud, and Compost. And Horses alerted me to the existence of alkanet (a.k.a. evergreen bugloss),a western European species that was introduced to the UK and the US, where it's especially abundant from British Columbia south to California, just like the native species of houndstongue. Also like that plant, it's a member of the borage family and has the same sort of "forget-me-not" flowers. It's fond of damp, shady sites. Fortunately, as far as I can tell, even though it is not a native plant as I'd hoped, it does not appear on the King County noxious-weeds list, though an annual species in the borage family does.

Cake Wrecks, Ultra-Yellow Labs, and Cat-a-Pull-Its

The author in a Zen-like
Becky Home-Ecky cake-
frosting moment. This is
a deceptive sort of calm.

The past few weeks have felt like one of those dreams in which you suddenly find that all your belongings have, for some unknown reason, been placed outside as if you are being evicted, and passers-by are examining them in wonder, picking them up and putting them down, always with the prowling threat that somebody might take something, and it's your job to run around and try to gather everything up and bring it back in the house, only you can't because people are constantly trying to catch your attention like you're a sales clerk during the annual Filene's Basement Running of the Brides. Plus whenever you try to use your phone, you keep misdialing the number, again and again, until you finally get it right but then the person at the other end can't hear you.

Which is to say, the past few weeks have been much like those of any other mom trying to balance a tray full of Responsibilities over her head while navigating her way through a restaurant crowded with people snapping their fingers, unexpectedly flinging an arm or shoving a chair into a pathway, and spilling their beverages.

And all that prologue is to justify a totally random posting of pictures. (Can something be a prologue if it is also pretty much the epilogue? I don't know. Discuss amongst yourselves.)

First off is The Cake.


Behold, Cake Rex.


When my family gathered for Easter this year, we decided to celebrate a host of birthdays as well, because during our year of mourning nobody really felt much like celebrating anything.

The celebration of five birthdays requires an extraordinary cake. So I baked and constructed a four-layer tower of a cake, slathering it with homemade icing that I tried to dye purple but which came out more of a lurid pink.Such confection perfection clearly needed to be set upon a worthy throne, so I hauled out the jadeite Martha Stewart cake stand.

The cake stand had done something weird a few years ago. It was sitting in the china cabinet, supposedly content with its lot, while I sat in the living room, minding my own business, reading a book. Suddenly I heard a loud clunk.

The cats were riveted in front of the cabinet, staring in horror, so I knew just where to look for the origin of the mysterious sound. And there stood my cake stand--or rather, half a cake stand. A huge chunk of the plate had sheared off along some hidden fault line, without anybody or anything touching it. Anything that a normal person (or cat) could hear, see, smell, or touch, that is.

I wrote to the catalog company that had sold me the cake plate, but they were Not Helpful. In fact, they told me they were not responsible for the plate because the catalog was now out of business (correlation, causation, anyone?) and they couldn't tell me who'd manufactured the stand, either. So I glued the thing  together and stuck it back in the china cabinet.

It seemed sturdy enough when I set the giant cake on it. When I sliced the cake into quarters, releasing some inner tension inside it, everybody gasped as each quarter leaned sideways, threatening to fall off the stand. Clearly each Leaning Tower of Piece-a-Cake needed to be sliced rapidly for serving, so I quickly bisected one of the quarters.

That's when the cake stand sheared in two again and the entire cake sprawled across the table. Cake Rex had become a contender for Cake Wrecks.

Waste not, want not. We wanted cake. We ate it anyway.

Other holiday festivity included discovering that our yellow Lab was even yellower than usual:

This is what happens when a teenaged girl discovers that the stamens of stargazer lilies brought in for Easter produce dusty gold pollen that works as a dye when rubbed on a surface.

Django, meanwhile, discovered a roll of ribbon just within reach on the basement stairs if he stuck his whole arm underneath the basement door to snag the end of the ribbon with one claw. He did his best to drag it to the water bowl to dunk it, but though the ribbon cooperated with him for most of its length, the roller it was on would not squeeze under the door, and so he was frustrated in not being able to achieve his goal.

Fifty Bits of Fifty

Full disclosure: I didn’t just turn 50. No, not me.  I actually recently turned 51.  So I’m an old (read: old) hand at being 50. 

I spent much of my daydreaming time at 49 thinking of fun things to do to celebrate turning 50, not knowing that due to family circumstances it was actually going to be the saddest year thus far of my life, but as another spring rolls around I’m once again contemplating making the most of my time in this world. 

Which probably should preclude doing things like compiling a list of 50 things about 50, but this activity pleased my inner librarian/packrat, and I like to keep on her good side.

So: 50 fifty-ish things about 50. Fingers crossed I stick around long enough to do 100 things about 100. 

1. There are—news flash—50 states in the Union. 

2. That’s why there are 50 stars on the U.S. flag. 

3. Hawaii is the 50^th state, surely therefore it is logical to go to Hawaii for your 50^th. 

4. Tin has 50 protons, so its atomic number is 50. 

5. 50 is the smallest number that is the sum of two non-zero square numbers: 50 =  1² + 7² and also 5² + 5². It is also the sum of three squares, 50 = 3² + 4² + 5². And yes, I cribbed that straight from Wikipedia. 

6. A jubilee year is a 50^th year—so you can honestly host a jubilee when you get to the half-century  mark. 

7. Reaching 50 years of marriage marks your golden anniversary. So your 50^th birthday can be considered your golden anniversary with Life, or Earth, or something along those woo-woo lines. 

8. 50 is also apparently “the fifth magic number in nuclear physics,” a magic number being “a number of nucleons, either protons or neutrons, such that they are arranged into complete shells with the atomic nucleus.” (Thanks again, Wikipedia.)

9. "Fifty-fifty" means all's fair.

10.  Just add a silent g, nobody will notice: The Dutch word Kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamheden is 49 letters long and means "preparation activities for a children's carnival procession." So your first 49 years could be seen as preparation activities for a celebration, and that is how I will shoehorn this in because I couldn’t nail down a 50-letter word. 

11.   In 2009, a racehorse received the name Fifty Fifty. 

12.  Every 8 seconds, another American turns 50.

  13.  Humans have 46 chromosomes. Among the living things with 50 chromosomes are the kit fox, the striped skunk, and the pineapple.

  14.  A total of 50 horses have won two-thirds of the Triple Crown races (Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes).

    
     15. 50 Miles of Art is a corridor that runs through Missouri along which fine artists and crafters live. 


     16.   In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy intones, “And what is
     fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day's journey. 
     Yes, I call it a very easy distance.'' 

     17. In 2009, a viper in a Bhopal zoo gave birth to 50 baby snakes
.

     18. 50 gallons of fresh water weighs about 417 pounds.

     19. And 50 gallons is about how much water a typical oyster filters in 1 day.

     20. Which would make it a poor roommate for an elephant,which drinks about 50 gallons a day. 

    21. If you had a pet elephant, you’d be well advised to use the bathtub as its water bowl:  a typical tub can hold about 50 gallons.

    22. That’s if the horse isn’t using the bathroom: a typical horse produces about 50 pounds of manure a day.

    23. But you could always use a rain barrel, an aquarium, or a  
     compost-tea brewer: these all come in standard 50-gallon models. 

     24. Sadly, the average American guzzles about 50 gallons of soda  

     in a year.

     25.  This is half of 50.

     26. A half-dollar equals 50 cents equals four bits.

     27. 50-cent coins have been minted nearly continuously since 1794, with only the penny being minted more consistently.

     28.   An opossum has 50 teeth.

     29.   What the L? It means 50 in Roman  
              numerals.

     30.   In the brilliant movie A Town Called Panic, Cowboy and Indian intend to build  their friend Horse a barbecue for his birthday.  They need 50 bricks, but accidentally order 50 million instead, leading to calamity.

     31. The song “50 Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong” was a hit 
     in 1927. In 1975, Paul Simon climbed the charts with “50 Ways   
     to Leave Your Lover.”  Which makes me wonder, if 50 million
     Frenchmen each came up with 50 ways to leave your lover, how
     many excuses does that make?

     32. Memory Lane in Rogersville, Tennessee, is a town filled with 1950s buildings that is open to the public just once a year.

     33. Driving at speeds more than 50 miles per hour uses up a lot more fuel due to air resistance and, no doubt, some complicated physics-and-math ratio that I don’t wish to deal with.

     34. Perhaps this is why such animals as lionesses, gazelles, racehorses, quarter horses, African hunting dogs, and wildebeests usually don’t hit a top speed of more than 50 miles per hour.  

     35. Ostriches run pretty darn fast,
     too, plus an ostrich’s eye is about 50 mm in diameter. The tall bird also sports up to 50 tail feathers. 

     36. A black tuna can swim at speeds up to 50 miles per hour. And heck, it doesn’t even have to worry about air resistance.

     37. In a crowd of about 20 or 30 people, there is a 50 percent chance that somebody else in the room will share your birth date.

     38. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was made in 1958. She wasn’t 45 feet tall; she wasn’t 100 feet tall. 50 must be something special indeed.

     39. Lego bricks celebrated their 50^th birthday
     on January 28, 2008. Since their invention in
     1958, the company’s made so many bricks
     that there are about 62 bricks for each person
     on the planet. Which leads to questions such
     as, how many of them willingly share their
     Legos? How many have they left on the floor for Mom to step on
     in bare feet in the night? Have you ever seen a purple Lego brick?

     40. A footbridge made of 50 tons of recycled plastic crosses the Tweed River in Peebleshire, Scotland. 

     41. Perhaps another bridge can be constructed from the 50 tons of  trash once left behind after the Rose Parade event in Pasadena, California.

    42.   The list of other creatures who can celebrate 50^th birthdays includes elephants, lobsters, bonobo chimps, Senegal parrots,  narwhals, bottle-nosed dolphins, right whales, rhinoceros, gorillas,      red-eared sliders, manatees, and, of course, the greenblotched      rockfish.

     43. Tegopelte was an ancient, giant cockroach-like creature that had up to 50 legs. 

     44. It would probably have loved eating Green Eggs and Ham, the eponymous meal of Dr. Seuss’s beloved book, which celebrated its 50^th birthday on August 12, 2010. Seuss wrote it after his editor challenged him to write an “intelligent, entertaining” book that used just 50 words.  Seuss not only got the book written and published, but won $50 in the bet. 

     45. Plain old white eggs starred in Cool Hand Luke, in which Paul  Newman’s character swallows 50 hard-boiled eggs in one hour.

   

     46. In 2006, Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in 50 consecutive days, one in each of the 50 states. 

     47. A refrigerator typically hums at 50 decibels.

     48. Although the actual social-scientist method for determining the divorce rate has it topping out at 41 percent of marriages, the popular figure for the divorce rate is that 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce.

     49. You could fit 50 moons inside Earth if it were hollow. And if you could ensnare and  duplicate the moon.

    And...

     50. The biggest rabbit in the world is an English bunny named Darius, who weighs 50 pounds.

White-Crowned Sparrows, Not Robins, Herald Spring

A winter robin in our birch tree, December 2011.

The robin is widely acclaimed to be a harbinger of spring in the United States; a robin appearing in late winter inspires many people to share the news that they've spotted one and thus spring must be around the corner.

How the bird earned this reputation isn't clear. In many parts of the country (such as here in the Pacific Northwest), robins are year-round residents. In places where robins migrate farther south for the winter, robins moving south from Canada may take their place.

The robin/spring equation isn't even a holdover from English folklore, as far as I can tell. Long-ago settlers from England, wistfully recalling the flora and fauna of their country, dubbed the big, feisty American thrush a robin because it had a russet breast like the spunky little English robin back home (which was once classified with thrushes but is now grouped with flycatchers).

But English robins, like many American ones, typically stick around for the winter (and are known for singing in fall and winter).

White-crowned sparrow, Magnuson Park, July 2011.

To me, it's the sweet, clear call of the white-crowned sparrow that signifies spring's arrival. White-crowns hang around all winter in the Puget Sound region, but I usually don't hear this little bird's melody until a Saturday in April, when it rings from the thickets striping the farmland near the stable that's our second home.

The white-crowned sparrow has starred in many studies seeking to unravel the mysteries of birdsong. Much of what we know about how birds learn to sing and birdsong dialects is based on research involving this species. Yet its plaintive melody hasn't yet been rendered in handy mnemonic-device form, unlike the "Poor Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody" of its cousin the white-throated sparrow or the "Quick, three beers!" of the olive-sided flycatcher.

Any existing efforts labor just to catch the rhythm of the song--it's translated variously online as "poor-wet-wetter-chee-zee" or "more, more, more cheezies, please pink!", making it sound like it's after Cheetos rather than singing a melody that, to me, is like a balmy, languid, summer afternoon distilled into notes on a flute.

Field guides, alas, aren't much help. David Allen Sibley's white-crowned sparrow is a "doodly-doo, I don't know the words" kind of singer that trills "feeee odi odi zeeee zaaaa zoooo." The Audubon field guide sternly declares that the bird's song "basically consists of a clear introductory whistle followed by 4-8 whistles or wheezy trills on different pitches." The Kaufman guide simply states that the song "varies, with local dialects" and usually includes "clear whistles and buzzy or trilled notes."

Author-ornithologists seem to have more leeway when they write outside the confines of a field guide (which of course must use words sparingly so that the physical book doesn't get so cumbersome it can't be carried into the field).

Photo by Mike Baird/Wiki Commons

Naturalist and conservationist John Burroughs, for example, who lived from 1837 to 1921, called the white-throat's melody a "sweet, quavering ribbon of song" that was the "most plaintive of all the sparrow songs." In expressing its sound, he notes that "it begins with the words fe-u, fe-u, fe-u, and runs off into trills and quavers like the song sparrow's, only much more touching."

Songs of the white-crowned sparrow do vary from place to place and subspecies to subspecies, and these distinctions were keenly observed by ornithologist William Leon Dawson (1873-1928). In his voluminous Birds of California, he describes one subspecies' song of "oh hee sween'tie chup ichin'" as having in it "the sprightliness of springing heather, the bright, compelling cheer of sunshine battling with glaciers for imprisoned waters, and a little of the wistfulness, withall, of whispering pines."

Another species trills "Hoo hooee, wheeoo hoo che wee che wee hee, chee oo chee chee wee che" (after which Dawson notes, "These imitations are very stupid, of course--about as expressive of Zonotrichian melody as a naked wire dummy is of a man." (The bird's genus is Zonotrichia.) A third subspecies, the one living in Seattle, he chides as a singer of a "prosy, iterative ditty" that ends with a trill of "a wooden quality which we may overlook in a friend, but should certainly ridicule in a stranger."

It was a northwestern bird's "prosy, iterative ditty" that led me to a white-crowned sparrow perched on the tippy-top of a conifer in a park on the Oregon coast in the early 1990s--it was a new bird for me (white-crowns are scarce back East where I grew up).

The next one I saw wasn't nearly as hard to spot: It had claimed the central courtyard of a local elementary school as its territory, and when I spent a few hours there as a volunteer cleaning and weeding, the sparrow hopped from tree to tree to supervise my work.

John James Audubon (1785-1851) had to work a lot harder to check out white-crowned sparrows (which he called "white-crowned finches"). "It is to the wild regions of Labrador that you must go, kind reader, if you wish to form a personal acquaintance with the White-crowned Sparrow," he wrote after an arduous trek through what sounds like a bog.

He then rhapsodizes about the sparrow's song:

"In such a place, when you are far away from all that is dear to you, how cheering is it to hear the mellow notes of a bird, that seems as if it had been sent expressly for the purpose of relieving your mind from the heavy melancholy that bears it down! The sounds are so sweet, so refreshing, so soothing, so hope inspiring, that as they come upon the soul in all their gentleness and joy, the tears begin to flow from your eyes, the burden on your mind becomes lighter, your heart expands, and you experience a pure delight....Thus it was with me, when, some time after I had been landed on the dreary coast of Labrador, I for the first time heard the song of the White-crowned Sparrow."

Of course, this didn't stop him from destroying a patch of habitat in his determined quest to procure a nest ("we returned with hatchets, cut down every tree to its roots, removed each from the spot, pulled up all the mosses between them, and completely cleared the place") and later shooting the "gentle and unsuspicious" nesting pair of birds.

Perhaps the white-crowns would agree that "oh, please, leave me be, be, be" might be a fair rendition of their song, but they're such friendly, cheerful little creatures that they'd be inclined to forgive Audubon his songbird slaughtering in the name of science. So I'll content myself with simply hearing "oh, spring's here at last, last, last."

Of Signing Chimps, Water Ouzels, and 10,000+ Bottle Caps

Washoe, from Wikipedia.

Yesterday I was up well before night gave way to the dark gray of a Seattle March morning to catch a tour bus to Ellensburg to enjoy a Christmas gift from my brother and mother: attendance at a Chimposium held at Central Washington University.

Chimposium is an opportunity to learn about and visit the famous chimpanzees who learned to communicate in American Sign Language in experiments that started in the 1960s. I was fortunate enough to attend a Chimposium in the early 1990s, when the matriarch of the five-chimp troop, Washoe, was still alive; she was the first non-human animal to communicate in ASL.

Today, just three chimps remain, one of them being Loulis, who was raised by Washoe and learned ASL from her. It's a fascinating place and project, the story of which is well told on the facility's website here.

The two male chimps greeted us with a show of territorial superiority--swinging from ropes, rampaging around the room, spinning, bouncing off the walls, and the like. The female, Tatu, banged on the window and then retreated to a corner to watch us with interest. She's fond of traditional "girly" stuff, and I saw her sign "lipstick" as she gazed at the crowd, which consisted largely of women of retirement age wearing one of Tatu's favorite cosmetics. (The CWU staff reports that Tatu likes black lipstick best.)

The hour spent at Chimposium was bracketed by other sightings, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Starting with the sublime: the beauty of the Cascades in winter, viewed from the comfort of a tour bus while it's being chained up to go over the pass. (OK, mixed with a little ridiculousness, as "Yanni" played on the bus's loudspeakers.)

The air was very still; the deciduous trees covered in snow made it look like the woods existed in both positive and negative formats.

I caught a glimpse of a small, chunky bird called the American Dipper just before the bus pulled out to resume our trip east, perched on a stone in the steam. The Dipper is also known by the far more wonderful name of Water Ouzel and is a remarkable creature: It hunts for food underwater, clinging to the substrate with its claws and walking about pecking up insects and larvae. It can also use its short, strong wings as flippers and stay underwater for 30 seconds at a time. Pretty cool.

I also caught a quick glimpse of a group of swans majestically gliding across a mountain pond. We whooshed by too quickly for me to check to see if they had a tiny spot of color at the base of their bills or not, which would tip me off as to whether they were Tundra or Trumpeter swans (I know, I'm a rubbish birder, forgive me), but the Tundra Swan appears to be more common and thus the more likely species.

The chimpanzees were sublime, too. It wasn't until we entered Ellensburg for lunch that the ridiculous began, in a delightful way.

Like finding out that we'd be eating at--where else?--a place called Rodeo City BBQ. Where signs warn you "Do Not Lean Back in Chair." You old cowpoke, you--mind yer manners.

And whereas most grocery stores are keen to hide the fact that vermin and insects might be lurking amongst their wares, or might choose to advertise sales on salmon, arugula, quinoa, melons, and the like if they are Seattle grocery stores, the market in Ellensburg takes a different approach:

After lunch (which consisted of decent barbecue and no bargain-priced maggots), I stepped out to visit another local attraction, a wonderland of fences and poles spackled with bicycle reflectors and bottle caps and bristling with nails, populated by everything from creepy mannequin heads to impaled teddy bears. This version of "It's a Small World" was Dick and Jane's Spot.

More than 10,000 bottle caps, two thousand bicycle reflectors, and hundreds of glass insulators and other odds and ends transform a once-humble house into a year-round festival.

Over at Chimposium, volunteers stress their efforts at "enrichment," activities and novelties for the chimps that get them thinking and help relieve the monotony of captivity; the artists who created this house are aces at enriching their own lives and those of passersby.

After pondering what I could do with all those spice jars, bread-bag plastic-tab thingies, toy unicorns, and other items cluttering up our house given enough time and a loaded hot-glue gun, I strolled up the main street in town and gravitated toward this inviting sign:

 Whew! Talk about enrichment! I'd just hit the jackpot. This was going to be fun. But no; alas, Bailey's Bibliomania had just closed down on March 11, for good, and indeed the books were being carted out of the store and onto a truck as I watched. Oh well.

But...wait a second. Here were shelves of free books. Not much on offer...outdated textbooks, water-damaged romance novels, pamphlets...and then, serendipity: the perfect, absolutely ghastly book to find when on a field trip to visit chimpanzees at an institute where the animals are treated with respect and the utmost in courtesy:

A Honey of a Chimp, according to a 1980 Kirkus review, is "a classic example of the children's book as synthetic commodity."  The back-cover copy explains that little Emily wants a pet "more than anything in the world," but her dad's allergic to cats, Mom doesn't like dogs, and hamsters and fish are "too boring" while snakes proved unpopular with everyone but Emily.

So, of course, the family procures a chimpanzee. Hilarity ensues.

The chimp grows up, naturally, and Emily learns a lesson that all chimp-owning adolescents eventually learn, namely that "even perfect things can't last forever." Hopefully this does not refer to Emily's perfect face, given what damage can be inflicted by an angry chimpanzee.

My family, of course, knew better than to get me a chimpanzee even though Mom was allergic to cats and didn't like dogs. I got a camel, a capybara, and a right whale. That's just the way it was, kids, back in the '80s.