The gift that flutters but never fades

It took the eponymous song of a black-capped chickadee (chick-a-dee-dee-dee, if you didn't know) to make me go anywhere near a store on a Saturday afternoon in December. But there he was, in a cold drizzle, anxiously aflutter around our empty bird feeder. OK, then, compadre. For you I'll break my vow of retail abstinence and stand in line for 10 minutes to buy some bird feed and suet cakes.

Once home, I poured black oil sunflower seed into the feeder that my friend, Thea, gave to me as a wedding present 16 years ago. It's nothing fancy: a clear acrylic tower with a pitched roof and landing board made of Michigan cedar. But in a season when we often buy pointless gifts for people who really don't need them, the bird feeder stands out as a worthy exception.

We put it out from early December to late March and probably run 100 pounds of seed through it. And you can't help but feel good about yourself after you've filled a bird feeder. Sometimes I think about the birds as I doze in my reading chair by the fireplace. It's a comfort to imagine them nestled under a snowy spruce bough, the furnace of their tiny heart fueled by the good seed that will keep them warm and alive till morning.

That's the altruistic magic of a birdfeeder. You can buy one for yourself, or buy one for a friend as Thea did for me. Either way, the feeder can only be used in the service of another creature. Selfishness doesn't become it.

For the first nine years that we fed the birds, I didn't think much about why. They had a ferocious appetite, which seemed reason and reward enough. (Whoever coined the phrase "eats like a bird" never watched famished birds swarm a feeder.) It gave me a proprietary sense of satisfaction, much as my mother must've felt when she watched her six-foot sons wolf down mountains of homemade mashed potatoes and Midwestern meat loaf.

Then came the year when the birds decided to take care of me for a while.

It was February, ruthlessly cold. For reasons that in hindsight seem blatantly obvious, I'd worked myself into a state of exhaustion -- mental, physical, spiritual you name it. Work had become a fixation that left me too tired to rest or recuperate. So my body, and my doctor, both demanded that I take two months of sick leave.

Part of my recovery required that I practice something called The Relaxation Response. Basically, you're supposed to sit in a quiet room and think peaceful thoughts. Which is fine, provided that you have thoughts that you'd like to spend time with. I did not, so I'd open my eyes and focus on something less disturbing ... like the bird feeder.

Sometimes, after I zoned out there for an hour or so, I'd glimpse an alternate reality. I'd begin to see the feeder as more than a humble food dispenser. It was a nexus of fluid energy and calculated motion. The birds would ascend and descend, angelic in form and manner, earthly seraphs around a lesser throne. Like waves at the beach, they'd come and go with a pattern that you could almost discern. Too bad they sent me back to work before I could figure it all out.

I'd love to hear what Thea would think of my metaphysical musings. Because there was nothing bird-like about her: big heart, big voice, big physique, a tireless newspaper reporter and an overall nonstop force of nature. Unstoppable, at least, until the end. She died of uterine cancer two years ago at age 53.

The last time I saw Thea she talked nonstop about her big plans to write a book titled "I Don't Have Time for This." Those were the first words out of her mouth when she learned of her diagnosis. Being a respectable journalist, she never had to retract them.

This year, for the first time in 16 years, I cleaned Thea's feeder and gave the cedar trim a coat of Tung oil to prolong its life. It's a hopeful gesture, and "Hope," wrote Emily Dickinson, "is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul."

Neither Thea nor I, ink-stained wretches that we are, would ever dare to write something that grand. But given the cheerful company of wild birds, I can understand why a fellow shut-in like Miss Dickinson would want to.

The Monsters We Can't Do Without

Under an ivory slice of autumn moon, a congress of coyotes and a lone screech owl have found their voice. Both sound larger than life. The owl's eerie tremolo fills the little woods across the road with a dark foreboding. And tonight, the coyotes seems unusually bent on mayhem; they yip and yammer like a gang of slathering jackals. I can picture their bony snouts thrust skyward, white throats aglow in the pure country moonlight.

It's enough to give me the willies. But why? I'm safe in the bedroom of a sturdy brick farmhouse. My black lab probably weighs more than any two neighborhood coyotes put together. And just last weekend, I saw a screech owl during a raptor demonstration at a local orchard. Its body was the size and shape of a beer can, with fluffy grey feathers and a Disney-cute swivel head. Why should its harmless night music evoke such a primal shiver?

Maybe it's because we want and even need the wild places around us to harbor a resident monster or two. Yes, we can invent vampire love stories and Bigfoot sightings to serve the same psychological purpose. But breathless teen fiction and blurred photos (how come Bigfoot only appears to people with lousy cameras?) can't substitute for the musk-in-the-nostril kick of the genuine article.

And for good reason. For most of the 120,000 years of human history, people have lived in places where, on any given day, a carnivorous creature could and would eat them for dinner. Such perils improved our game considerably. They drove us to create the first tools -- spears, bows, axes -- and to unite as clans and communities.

As white settlers tamed North America, one of the first things they did was extirpate predators: wolves, mountain lions and grizzly bears. True, these creatures posed a threat to livestock, and to a far lesser degree, people. Yet to track and kill toothsome beasts also became the legendary measure of a pioneer's courage and prowess. Then, curiously, as soon as they were gone we began to lament their demise. As early as 1872 (four years before the death of Custer at Little Bighorn) Buffalo Bill created his first Wild West show, complete with cowboys, Indian warriors and captive widlife from the just-vanquished frontier.

But as if to spite civilization, the monsters have staged a comeback. There's now nearly 700 wolves in the Upper Peninsula (up from 80 in 1995). Black bears have moved down in the Lower Peninsula as far south as Grand Rapids and Jackson. Still, the age-old ambivalence remains. Ask a U.P. hunter who didn't bag a buck last year if he thinks the estimated 25,000 deer killed by wolves hurt his chances for success. It's not likely he'll wax poetic about the feral beauty of a wolf pack's howl. Or imagine if the first bruin in 150 years should raid a dumpster in the parking lot of an elementary school in Kalamazoo. Will new age eco-tolerance or SWAT team histrionics rule the day?

Whatever your take on these encounters, they offer a valid, hopeful measure of nature's health and resilience. They bestow an imprimatur of wildness returned, a sense that the center still holds. And as the screech owl suggests, they don't have to be big and bad-breathed furry. I include in their number a fearsome pike that I hooked and lost twice (!) last May in the dark waters under a bridge near my home. Then there's the peregrine falcon outside my office in downtown Battle Creek. It hunts from concrete cliffs and adorns the sidewalks below with the heads and carcasses of hapless starlings and pigeons. Good for you, my brother. It's a comfort to know that noble monsters still lurk where we need them the most.

To be or to do? How to reply when the wind speaks your name

The September breeze has decorated our backyard fire pit with a garland of yellow leaves from a nearby walnut tree. That’s a walnut tree for you. They’re always the first to call it quits and drop the curtain on summer.

With our fishing poles and canoe now stowed in the barn, I’ve reluctantly done the same thing. All that remains of summer is a plastic pail of dull stones that someone left on the patio. Could these really be the same red and green jewels that we plucked wet and sparkling from the cold rush of the Lake Superior surf?

Eventually, they’ll end up in the flower bed – just like the others did last year. No matter. I’ve already got plenty of Up North tchotchkes to clutter my fire place mantle. Besides, for this year’s souvenir, I’ve brought home something better: a keepsake memory that I’d do well to ponder for the 45 weeks until my next vacation.

The setting was Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, near Munising in the Upper Peninsula. It was Friday afternoon, the last day of vacation. And while I’d enjoyed the week, a part of me had never let go. I’d yet to feel deeply relaxed, that moment of blissful detachment when recreation becomes true re-creation.

While the family swam and combed the beach for agates, I wandered down a hiking trail near the Miner’s River. It led through a dark stand of hemlock, but it wasn’t wilderness. It was too close to the beach and parking lot for that. The river, too, was pleasant but unremarkable; like dozens of other knee-deep, tea-colored streams in the U.P.

But as I veered off the main trail to visit the river, something stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t a really breeze; it was more like a fragrant exhalation from the woods itself. The air was deliciously hot, dry and sun-cured; sweet with the turpentine aroma of pine sap. Above the water, the unnamed wisp had swept two yellow butterflies into a thermal updraft. They rose in a delicate spiral, a DNA helix come to life. It was an aerial ballet, I tell you. The butterflies mirrored each other’s moves as if choreographed. It was so startlingly human that it almost seemed creepy.

And that did it. The world at hand, the one I’d driven 500 miles to explore and enjoy, finally had my full attention. For the first time that week, I noticed how supremely comfortable I was in my summer vestments: baggy shorts, old t-shirt and fishing cap, good walking sandals. How could I ever stand to wear anything else?

Everything that meant vacation was suddenly right there. The lakeshore, the woods, the U.P., the whole blessed summer had gathered itself into this singular moment and place. Here, in a one-seat shrine edged by living steeples of white spruce.

You could still hear the rumble of cars on the washboard road to the beach. But the sudden quiet I’d found here was of a different sort – more within than without. It was the stillness that I once tried to find through meditation but never could. I must’ve spent 20 minutes there, partly to savor it, but also to ask why all of this had found me here.

Like most of us, I’d gone on vacation to do things. To fish and hike and canoe; to rent a cottage on a lake in the woods; to eat pasties and ride the tourist boats out of Munising Bay. I’d taken a long to-do list Up North, but what I really needed was a to-be list. And you know it’s bad when they have to dispatch two yellow butterflies to tell you that.

A Young Girl's Guide to Power Tools

At age 12, our daughter has discovered that a front yard’s more than a soft, green place to turn cartwheels. It’s also a renewable source of income. I hate to mow, and I’ll gladly pay her since it leaves me free to garden, fish, pick berries and generally indulge the fleeting pleasures of summer.

There’s just one problem: she can’t the start mower without me. It’s a second-hand push model that takes three or four Dad-sized yanks before the engine smokes and sputters to life.

“Dad,” she says, with a girlish, pony tailed sincerity that will soon enough break hearts other than my own. “What’s up with this thing?”

I suppose it could be a rusty spark plug, clogged fuel filter or fractured electron transducer shield for all I know. But there’s another answer that I won’t burden her with just yet. The mower won’t start because it’s a machine – a soulless, unreliable, infuriating and deceptively time-consuming piece of mechanical enslavement.

Own a house, especially in the country, and you’ll feel obligated to own plenty of labor-saving devices. Chainsaws, snow blowers, rototillers, weed-whackers and leaf blowers are the usual suspects. All useful in their own right, yet all encumbered with hidden costs of maintenance, storage and repair. You can quickly end up as a small-engine wet nurse to a fleet of internal combustion ingrates. Here’s three of the biggest offenders:

The Chainsaw: I’ve got a small one that won’t run for any longer than 90 seconds. It cost $120 new, and last week, a mechanic said he’d charge me $100 to fix it. Yet here’s the subversive truth: if all you need is a few cords of wood to burn in a fireplace, then you don’t need a chainsaw. You need to know somebody with a chainsaw and volunteer to help them. That’s because guys who love to cut wood are far less eager to lug and load it onto a truck or trailer. It’s unglamorous work and if you pitch in, they’ll give you some. Especially the crooked pieces.

The Rototiller: The deluxe hydraulic model that I like cost $5,000. So every year, I rent one for $40 to till my garden. And every year, something breaks. This spring, the pull cord snapped off on the first try. It took a 40-minute round trip to the rental store to get a new one. All that aggravation for a single day: can you imagine the headaches if I owned it for the other 364?

The Leaf Blower: I’ve never had a leaf blower, but God does so I use his. He fires it up in late October, when an exuberant, 30 mile an hour gale blows in from the Great Plains. It sweeps the yard clean and deposits 90 percent of our leaves into the vacant field next door. Best of all, the Big Guy handles all the oil changes.

I’ve always assumed that my daughter would share my aversion toward steel creatures with a crank case heart. This summer, I even begged her to try my beloved hand clippers – the ones that make a musical snip-snip when I trim grass from around a tree. But she just asked why we don’t own a weed whacker.

Then, when I returned from a business trip in July, my daughter dropped this bomb: “Dad, guess what? I started the mower without you!”

Like last year’s MP-3 player, my services had been rendered obsolete. Yet isn’t that the whole point of parenthood? We give kids the tools and let them make of the world what they will. They can hardly do worse than we did. Still, I hope that my daughter will always rely more on her own muscle, and the occasional divine wind, than on the over-hyped promises - and treacherous pull cords -- of mechanical salvation.

Turtle Savers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose (Except Maybe a Few Fingers)

Along the highways of Michigan, even an animal lover can get jaded by the sight of road-killed wildlife. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rigor-mortised deer, rancid raccoon or dead opossum that’s no longer just playing possum. Unless you’re the one who hit them, you rarely give their sad, gory remains a second thought.

Not so the noble turtle. Their demise always seems especially tragic and deeply unfair. While road traffic can endanger all wildlife, a hapless turtle can’t dash, hop or reverse direction with point-guard agility the way that a squirrel or even agile deer can. No, once a turtle begins its deliberate slog across hard pavement the trip almost always ends in disaster. There’s either a sickening crunch or a carom shot that makes them spin off the road like a jettisoned hubcap.

Some drivers, as a form of sadistic motor sport, even try to hit turtles rather than avoid them. For literary proof, listen to what John Steinbeck wrote in “The Grapes of Wrath" of all places. In this, the 20th Century’s most epic social commentary, he took most of chapter 3 to describe the following encounter:

“… And now a light truck appeared, and as it came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it (emphasis mine). His front wheel struck the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway ...”

In Steinbeck's story -- an otherwise unflinching portrayal of the Okie diaspora -- he lets the turtle survive the collision unharmed. Perhaps there's some reptilian symbolism at work here that only a tenured English professor could understand. But from what I've seen, once a turtle gets thus whacked it’s done for. The turtle’s wonderfully adapted shell, a lifelong home and fortress that’s impervious to all natural predators, has not evolved to withstand the 3,000-pound footprint of an automobile.

On three occasions I've damaged or wrecked my car in deer accidents, but it’s just not the same. Nothing wrenches my heart like the sight of a turtle, stoic and suicidal in its quixotic quest to cross a two or even four-lane gauntlet of asphalt.

So in a response that may be equally quixotic, I’ve started an unofficial club to help them. It’s called the Free and Self-Appointed Protectorate of Esteemed Michigan Turtle Savers. Anyone can join. There’s no dues, no newsletter, no meetings, no administrative balderdash of any kind. All members should operate as individual cells, autonomous and self-supporting. From me, their enlightened and enigmatic founder (praise be to His Most Illustrious Name) they can expect some vague ideological guidance, but not much else.

In fact, here’s all that any Turtle Saver in good-standing needs to do: stop, and pick up a turtle whenever they see one about do something fatally boneheaded like cross a busy road.

Then, carefully and safely (no need to make yourself road kill) carry the turtle to the other side. Just be sure to move them in the direction that they were headed. Most likely, they’re driven by a strong biological urge to mate, build a nest or find a critical food source. They follow their own star and you won't convince a stubborn turtle to change its course. For good measure, I usually set them down 20 feet or so beyond the road shoulder, so that they’re concealed by natural habitat.

I’m always extra careful when I move snapping turtles. Pick one up and you’ll see why. With its long neck extended, a snapper’s frightful jaws can reach about anywhere on its body. And fast. So I grab them by the base of their tail, although lightly as to not damage any vertebra. Does this method give them a backache? Possibly, but it sure helps me keep all 10 fingers intact.

And it’s not just big turtles that need to be saved.

This June, my daughter found a baby snapper in a roadside mud puddle. She named him Leonard, and for two weeks he lived in a tub on our front porch where he ate worms and lettuce. But a turtle deserves more from life than a Tupperware holding cell. So we carried Leonard to a pleasantly weedy and buggy irrigation pond about a ½ mile away. With a little luck, he'll revel there in the green scum and black muck for a good 75 years or so.

On our walk back, a farmer drove up in his four-wheeler to investigate. We were, after all, trespassers on his property. These days, along with droughts and insect pests, farmers have to worry about thieves who strip electric cable from their irrigation systems. Or, steal their ammonia fertilizer to make the accursed steet drug, meth.

“How you doin’?” he asked, in a tone that was Midwestern neighborly, yet hinted at caution.

Once we explained our turtle rescue and release mission, his lined, dusty face relaxed a bit. That, and the fact that one of the trespassers was 4 feet 5 inches tall, with blond pony tail and a Snoopy t-shirt.

“Oh yeah, they’re really on the move now,” he said. “This morning we found a big ole snapper in the corn field so we put her back in the pond, too. She must've weighed 25pounds.”

Here he was, a haggard farmer with a 1,000 acres worth of reasons to do something else. True, he seemed to face no hardships of the apocalyptic variety, the way that Steinbeck's Tom Joad did. But I don't doubt that he has chronic hypertension and a pile of six-figure debt riding on this year’s corn harvest. Yet somehow, he’d just added the title of Turtle Saver to his already endless job description.

Why? Well, we modern humans already spend most of our days in shells of our own making. They keep us clean and dry, but their climate control and tinted windows (standard equipment, even on most tractors), can insulate us from the plight of our brother creatures. Maybe that’s why it feels so good to commit a random, if quixotic act of turtle rescue. It helps us protect something within ourselves that’s wild, valuable and equally worth saving.

Michigan Cougars: Fact, Fiction and Future

For at least a decade, there’s been an ongoing argument about whether or not wild cougars exist in southwest Michigan. Personally, I haven’t decided either way. But from both sides, I will say there’s been no shortage of “mountain lyin’” if you get my drift.

From the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, we’ve heard dismissive denials and a “we-know-best” attitude about wildlife. The message here has been that only a DNR biologist has enough brain power to identify a cougar when they see one.

As for the public, their cougar credibility has often ranked right up there (or down there) with sightings of Elvis or Sasquatch. We’ve heard reports of black cougars, although in the U.S. not a single black cougar has ever been killed or photographed. We’ve heard claims about deer carcasses hung from trees, which is something an African leopard would do, but not a North American cougar.

But the controversy may soon be settled by an unlikely judge: the cougars themselves. As DNR biologist Steve Chadwick said at a recent public meeting in Three Rivers, “It’s only a matter of time before a wild cougar turns up in southwest Michigan.”

True, the DNR has yet to confirm a cougar sighting in the Lower Peninsula. That would require either a clear paw print, scat pile, DNA sample or legitimate photograph. However, solitary males have already migrated more than 700 miles east from the Black Hills. Last year, a cougar was killed near Chicago and another was verified in Greene County, Indiana, a mere 300 miles south of Kalamazoo.

The DNR, once tone-deaf to public opinion on cougars, has changed its tune. To investigate serious sightings, they’ve formed an official cougar team that trained at a ranch in New Mexico. When they do verify a cougar, as they have in the western U.P., they’re quick to inform the news media.

“When we have the goods, we tell people,” Chadwick said. “We’re not trying to hide anything.”

My question is how the people of southern Michigan will react once the big cats officially return. For me, to see such a majestic eminence pad through an oak-hickory forest at dusk would be a peak life experience. For others, the thought of a six-foot long, 150-pound killing machine afoot in the landscape would be due cause to keep a.30-30 rifle handy.

Given these extremes, here’s what will likely be the cougar’s biggest human obstacles.

The first is personal safety. DNR officials say there’s already an unwarranted fear of cougars, a solitary animal that wants little to do with people. Yes, there’s been rare cases of attack on humans. But in the mountain west, millions of people live safely in cougar country without incident. Around here, shouldn’t we worry more about the amped-up maniacs who run rural meth labs?

The other potential cougar concern will likely involve what the animals eat – which is mainly deer. Some hunters may argue that an influx of cougars will put a major dent in the whitetail population. But consider this: in my own St. Joseph County, hunters bagged 5,300 deer in 2009 and vehicle accidents claimed another 700. By comparison, an average cougar kills about one deer per week. Given the cougar’s wandering ways, we’re unlikely to see more than one resident cougar per county. So if a cougar took 50 deer annually, that’s less than 1 percent of my county’s yearly harvest.

Finally, for all their wily ways, cougars don’t fare well on highways. In south Florida, about 100 cougars still haunt the Everglades – and eight to 10 are killed each year in vehicle accidents. With nearly 1,000 miles of paved roads in St. Joseph County alone, there’s bound to be some big flat cats for local taxidermists to work with.

Despite the odds, there’s seems to an unstoppable force at play here. Since I moved to the country in 1995, I’ve seen several near-extinct species -- sand hill cranes, beavers, coyotes, and wild turkeys -- make a remarkable comeback. Now, after a 100-year exile, our reigning feline predator stands poised to reclaim its ancestral hunting grounds. I think we’re lucky, indeed blessed, to get such a second chance. And I hope we’ll find room in the countryside, and in our hearts, to welcome the cougar home.

Country dogs: born to be wild -- and smell that way

When it comes to chew toys for dogs, some last for years but others … well, they’re much easier to swallow. Consider the coyote – we dubbed him Crunchy Calvin -- that showed up at our farmhouse recently.

“Calvin” had obviously had a rough winter. By the time our black lab dragged him home, he was little more than a scruffy pelt with a few crunchy parts attached. During their first dog/coyote play date, Calvin literally lost his head. Within three days, his feet, tail and other bits of anonymous fluff were likewise detached and most likely eaten.

So: would you let your dog eat a dead coyote? Or browse on the spoils of a compost pile? Or eat a baby rabbit that it just dug – still squeaking -- from a grassy burrow?

If you answered “yes” to at least two of these questions then chances are you’ve got a country dog – or at least, a city dog that lives by country dog rules. By that, I mean a dog that’s left as free as possible to pursue its own doggish nature. Country dogs enjoy plenty of freedom, with all the adventure and hardship that a life lived out-of-doors entails. Country dogs are loved, but never smothered; they’re cared for, but rarely pampered; they’re well-trained, but not expected to act like a miniature human being.

When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, dogs occupied a much lower rung on the social ladder. Even in town, they lived in backyard dog houses where they chewed real bones and survived on table scraps or cheap pet food. They had dog names like Sport, Dixie, Buddy and Sarge. They were friendly enough, but your hand always smelled a little funky after you petted one. Except for the occasional rabies or distemper shot, they rarely saw the inside of a vet’s office.

Nowadays, millions of Americans have elevated their dogs to the status of life partner or surrogate child. In his book “One Nation Under Dog,” author Michael Schaffer writes that eighty-five percent of pet owners now refer to themselves as the Mommy or Daddy of their companion animals. Forty-seven percent of dog owners say their pet sleeps in bed with them at night.

Across the United States, spending on pets mushroomed from $15 billion in 1995 to $45 billion in 2009. There are now pet-food nutritionists, veterinary dermatologists, dog kennels with TVs, and – inevitably -- lawyers who specialize in pet custody cases.

The sad paradox, animal experts say, is that dogs get confused and misbehave when we treat them too much like people. They still expect us to be leaders of the pack. Consequently, thousands of “pet parents” now medicate their animals for doggie A.D.D, anxiety, depression and other suspiciously human-like disorders. But what if we’re trying to make a simple, fur-bearing mammal serve a social purpose that it’s biologically unsuited to fill? Furthermore, what if it’s not the dog that needs therapy? As Edward Abbey once said, "When a dog is a man's best friend, then that dog has a problem."

With a country dog, you try to balance reasonable safety with the canine need for self-directed exploration. This means that sometimes they’ll kill little live things that you wish they hadn’t. And that other times they’ll roll in something dead, flat and stinky that you wish they’d left on the road. Yet these are dogs after all … must we micromanage their every instinct and pleasure?

It’s been about 10,000 years since dogs first consented to live with humans. So in truth, they’re no longer born to be wild. But every so often, it doesn’t hurt to unhook the leash, cry havoc and let them live that way

39 bottles of wine by the road, 39 bottles of wine ...

There's an otherwise scenic country road near my home that holds great appeal for aficionados of cheap wine. And not just any wine, but Arbor Mist. While I've never drank the stuff, I now know this much. It costs around $4 a bottle, rarely shatters on impact and comes in 12 tooty-fruity flavors that eventually all smell like putrid Kool Aid.

Now there's no reason to feel morally superior because your buzz comes from a $20 bottle of Merlot with a genuine cork instead of a screw cap. When times are this hard, there's a legitimate need for some cheap happy. Besides, mix in a little slow dance and Michigan might even achieve positive population growth.

My problem concerns the containers that all that cheap happy comes in. On a walk last Sunday with my wife and two daughters, we picked up 39 empty Arbor Mist bottles -- 39! -- that were scattered along a two-mile stretch of road. We'd brought along two empty trash bags, but they got so heavy and foul-smelling that we had to come back with my car and get them later.

After some initial grousing the kids even made a game of it. They'd chant Ar-bor Mist, Ar-bor Mist, Ar-bor Mist until they found another dead soldier -- about every 200 feet or so. And they kept track of the most popular varieties. Like a truck stop sommelier, my 8-year-old daughter's vocabulary now includes the terms Exotic Fruit and Sangria Zinfandel (which won hands-down). Although I'm afraid the moldy dregs she found inside the bottles may make her swear off fermented beverages forever.

But we also talked about the sad truth behind all this dismal litter. There's likely no romance here, just some lonely soul who's in a deadly hurry to get joylessly inebriated. So it's drink, drive, toss out window and repeat as necessary. I just pray that he keeps one steady hand on the wheel since the road's lined with big, obstinate trees that do not suffer fools gladly. That's the dark side to cheap wine and anyone who makes or sells this stuff must know that.

For the kids, this was also good practice but for reasons that they can't presently fathom. Soon enough they'll have to clean up numerous messes that were not of their own making: trillions in ill-spent government debt; two or three unfinished wars; the occasional oil spill or nuclear catastrophe; and once they're parents, the dank surprises that they'll encounter inside several years' worth of loaded diapers.

After their Dad-mandated community service, the girls were proud and even a bit self-righteous about what we'd accomplished. A little of that's fine by me, though. Because after someone trashes your home ground, they've got no right tell you to put a cork in it.

Dough, Ray, Me: a Home-Baked Solution to Community Bliss

Last week, in my small town of Three Rivers, we watched with pride as our Lady Cats basketball team fought its way to the state championship in Lansing. They lost, but not for want of vocal support. Nearly 2,000 purple-clad fans drove two hours to see the game -- about 25 percent of our population. When the team bus arrived home at 11 p.m. it was faithfully met by a fire truck, police cars and even an RV that led them on a victory lap of downtown.

Even if you don't care much for sports, you've got to appreciate such a generous display of community spirit. I was sad to see it end, and wished the excitement and camaraderie would've lasted a few weeks more. But alas, to everything there's a season.

Or is there? As I thought of other ways that communities can build unity through shared experience, another event came to mind. This one took place in Munising, an unpretentious Upper Peninsula town on the shores of Lake Superior.

It was early afternoon and we'd stopped for a picnic lunch at a lakeside park. While the kids played on the beach, I saw a guy -- let's call him Ray -- loading split chunks of maple into what looked like a wood-fired pizza oven. Except that it was outside.

"So what do you call this thing?" I asked.

"Oh, dis is da community oven," Ray said, with a classic Yooper accent. "I'm firin' it up for my girlfriend so they can bake in it tonight. Gotta keep 'em happy, eh?"

When we came back that night, it wasn't just Ray's girlfriend that he'd made happy. Hundreds of townsfolks had gathered for a free outdoor concert. It was a kaleideocope audience: young parents with kids on blankets, old folks in lawn chairs and walkers, kids on bikes and bikers with beards and black leather jackets. The musician, an acoustic minstrel who'd slept in his van the night before, played enough Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Kurt Cobain and Johnny Cash to keep his eclectic fans happy.

But the singer was no more a hit than the oven was. There it sat, a sturdy beehive of brick as humble and lovable as a plump grandma in her kitchen. From its mouth came forth a procession of blueberry muffins, biscuits, cheesy bread and some incredible little hand-tossed pizzas. Volunteers manned the oven with long-handled paddles and as each batch hit the table it sold out immediately to a swarm of customers. A seductive, fresh-baked fragance hung over the entire evening like a benediction.

The oven was low-tech and low-maintenance -- no electricity, no mess to clean-up. The bakers showed up, rolled out their dough and once it was gone so were they. All proceeds went to charity.

It all reminded me that a community's like a tribe of sorts. Yes, we gather to cheer our young warriors, resplendent in their local colors and totems, as they fight rival tribes on the fields of athletic conquest. It's a healthy outlet for our competitive human bloodlust.

Yet tribes also have an inborn need to celebrate and feast around a common hearth. That's how it was in the Middle Ages when villages often had a shared oven where people could bake bread and rehash gossip in equal measure.

Community ovens have caught on nationwide and I hope we build one in my town. There's a perfect spot by the fire station on a grassy bank that overlooks the river. The firefighters could savor the smell of blueberry muffins as they laid another coat of polish on their big red trucks. And when the baking's done, maybe an escort of Lady Cats could bring them over a plateful.

A Sure Route to Stardom

The March weather has been unseasonably chilly, but last week it finally warmed up enough to enjoy the night sky. You remember the night sky, right? That eternally dark void that looms overhead for much of the long winter? That vast vault of space that we ignore as we rush into the house after work or a trip to the store?

It was my daughter Emily, an antsy eight-year old, who convinced me to go outside and take a look. "Dad," she said, "I saw this robot thing up in the sky. It's really cool, you've got to see it!"

From our front yard, the robot was easy to find. For millennia, it's been known by Greek, Arab and Chinese astronomers as the Great Hunter -- the constellation Orion. I told Emily about the dagger that hangs from Orion's three-starred belt. And about Orion's brightest stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel. I also pointed out Sirius, the dog star that hunts at Orion's feet and Lepus the rabbit, and then I ...

"Yeah," Emily interrupted, a bit unconvinced. "But it still looks like a robot."

And she's right. For that matter, Orion also resembles a football referee with his arms raised to signal a touchdown. But with low-tech stargazing, that's part of the game. The expert answer doesn't have to be your answer. If you think, as I do, that the constellation Auriga looks more like home plate than it does some deity on a chariot, who's to say you're wrong?

Many stargazers don't even use a telescope. I know: the one I got for Christmas a few years back now gathers dust webs in the barn. For beginners, telescopes are actually a barrier because they focus on a narrow point in the sky. You can't learn to identify constellations one star at a time. You've got to scan the whole horizon -- much as a barefoot, goat-herding astronomer would have done on the plains of ancient Arabia.

Our Digital Age knowledge of course helps. You can download a free on-line star chart, and with that, locate dozens of constellations with the naked eye. Just start with an easy constellation like Orion, then stairstep your way to others in that quadrant of the universe.

That's what Emily and I did as we looked north to find the Big Dipper. It was here -- and dads live for such moments -- that she recalled something I'd said a year ago: "Where's the big W -- Cassie-something, the one that's chained to a rock?" We found the W, Cassiopeia, although it's actually her daugher, Andromeda, who's chained nearby. But she'll be detained there for several light years, so Emily's got plenty of time to get her facts straight.

For lay people, the sciences can seem distant and cold-hearted; bound by facts and drained of emotion and humanity. With the stars, we've struck a compromise. Today's astronomers may use the Hubble telescope to discover galaxies, black holes and nebula that go by lifeless labels such as M-42. Yet we still call our beloved constellations by some of the oldest names of all. Long after I'm gone, I hope these legends, writ large on the starry scroll of the sky, will help my daughter find joy and wonder in the night.

Five ways to tell it's winter in a country farm house

The years have a way of making technology lose its luster and bluster. And so do the centuries. When my Michigan farmhouse was built, the latest in on-line hardware was a telegraph key. With that, a hayseed hacker might've tapped out a Morse code missive to the White House -- which was then occupied by President Abraham Lincoln.

We've lived in our two-story brick home for 16 years and have spent more money to renovate the place than we did to buy it. As for the technological upgrades, they've been more third-world than world class. In lieu of gadgets, we've added heat registers; electrical outlets; a flush toilet, clothes closets; and (my favorite) windows that actually open. The upstairs had none of these FDR-era amenities when we moved in.

Even now, in some rooms and corners, it still feels like 1860. There's a certain wilderness within that will not be tamed, no matter how we try to refurbish the house into submission. It's a primal force, an indwelling native spirit that refuses to yield. You feel it whenever the hawkish winter wind keens around the eaves and rattles the 12-pane windows. You see it personified in the tree-trunk floor posts, their bark still on, that stand like petrified sentinels in the cobble stone Michigan basement.

When I was younger, stronger and dumber, I figured to have everything modernized in three, maybe four years, tops. Now I know it's a battle I'll never win -- and perhaps am not meant to. As long as I'm here, I've decided to leave some regions of the house forever wild. Which is to say cold, dark, dirt-floored, unpainted and congenial to over-wintering rodents. From December to late March, that means the outdoors will often be as close as the next room. Although even without a calendar, here's five ways to tell that winter has come to stay:

You can see your breath in the back living room: Officially -- here's the irony -- it wasn't called a living room but a summer kitchen. Meals were cooked there during hot weather, so that the main kitchen's woodstove wouldn't overheat the house. Our summer kitchen was built above a dirt-floored crawl space. I went down there once to insulate and got briefly and terrifyingly stuck between the hand-hewn timber beams and the bare earth. (It struck me then as the kind of dark, forgotten cavity where a serial killer would hide dismembered body parts.) Anyway, we've since made it a comfortable living room and added a cheery, wood-burning fireplace. When it's ablaze, we can raise the temperature to near 70. During the week, when there's no fire, temps hover in the upper 20s. The bright side? It's yet to snow out there and there's virtually no wind chill.

Your propane gas bill is higher than the mortgage payment: OK, I've admitted it publicly, but refuse to disclose more details than that. So please: don't try to sell me on geothermal heat pumps, solar panels, windmills, corn burners, wood pellet burners, methane gas digesters, or -- especially -- outdoor wood-fired boilers like my brother has. There's tradeoffs and complicating factors to all these that make the costs shake out about equally. Suffice to say that you've got to pay through the nose to keep your feet warm in an historic domecile. Living in the past ain't as cheap as it used to be.

The Mouse Drawer has full occupancy: To keep all rodents out of a 19th century farm house, you'd have to encase it in concrete blast walls like those around the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Absent that, and because my three indolent cats could care less, I've become the resident mouser. It's a typical case of asymmetrical warfare. I come armed with my human hubris and conventional American weaponry -- i.e. traps baited with peanut butter (crunchy works better than creamy). And the mice, like militant peasants everywhere, know and own the local terrain. I'm an invading infidel whose been here a mere 15 years. Their kind, thousands of generation's worth, have occupied this porous-walled homeland for 160 years.

I usually trap 6-7 under the kitchen sink, after the cold weather has driven them indoors in the fall. Then after those early victories, a defiant little band retreats to the dreaded Mouse Drawer. It's a narrow rectangle of impregnable high ground just left of the stove, a Khyber Pass where all my attempts at homeland defense meet with futility. We do keep some old utensils there, but my wife considers them accursed and unclean. Trust me: no measure of disinfection could render them touchable. The chilling phrase, "That came from ... the Mouse Drawer?" ends all discussion about the topic.

The storeroom doubles as a refrigerator: This one's more a convenience than a detriment. Don't have enough room to cool a six-pack of beer or few liters of pop? Got a big leftover kettle of soup that's still too hot to set in the refrigerator? Or bags of apples, baskets of summer squash, bundles of sweet onions and clumps of dried dill and basil? Then let winter work for you for a change. Transform (probably too grand a word) your store room/mud room, garage into a walk-in cooler. Yes, you've got to overcome the prudish, bourgeoisie notion that it's unseemly to store edibles next to a volleyball net or rusty tool box. But what's the difference between 35 degrees in a refrigerator and 35 degrees in a mudroom? You think the food cares? Besides, we've had no problems out there with mice; they'd rather stay in the main house where it's warm.

The reign and ruin of the icicle kingdom: As earlier mentioned, old houses leak heat the way press secretaries leak scurrilous news tips. When heat migrates to a cooler surface it surrenders its latent energy to cause condensation. On a glass of iced tea in June, that process raises those delightful beads that trickle down to dampen your drink coaster. On a steel roof in January, it melts the snow to form rivulets of distilled water that drip from the eaves and form icicles. Everyone loves how they look; elegant cylinders of tapered crystalline that refract the clear winter sun like fine quartz. Even the melodious drip, drip, drip can be a meditation on a drowsy Sunday afternoon.

Under the right conditions, I've seen icicles that are six-feet long and as big around as a girl's waist. We grow them that big in the L-shaped crook of our house. And there they hang, homicidal stalactites on the cliffs of doom. Until, at about 1 a.m. on some foggy February night, they crash and boom to earth like calving icebergs in a Norwegian fjord. Startling in the extreme, but not altogether unwelcome. It's simply the Lord's own water music, come to tell the old house that winter has loosened its icy grasp once more.

A New Year in the Garden of Good and Weevil

The term winter gardening sounds like an oxymoron. A garden's usually a dismal sight in winter, with its exburant greens, yellows and reds all withered to fetid brown or funereal grey. It's the cadaver of summer left uninterred.

At least that's how a gardener in southern Michigan feels until the January thaw seeps in. It brings a tantalizing respite, a fool's gold glimpse of spring even if it only lasts a day or two. This year it jumped the gun and showed up on New Year's Eve. By 8 a.m. the next day, the thermometer outside our kitchen window read 42 degrees Fahrenheit -- and would climb to a sunny 53 by day's end.

Most spring-like of all was the wind: fresh, bright, clean and alive with all the unsullied hopes of a new year. It drove away my early winter doldrums, not to mention the scrum line of minor litter (school papers, junk mail/junk food wrappers) that emanate from our van's driveway parking space.

A few bits of trash blew downwind to the garden, which is where I noticed an oasis-like patch of true green. It wasn't a complete surprise. I'd planted a row of turnip and carrot seeds in late August and planned to harvest them by Thanksgiving. It had simply turned too cold, too fast in December for me to do that. Since I neglected to cover them with leaf mulch, I assumed they'd be turned to mush.

Yet with the snow melted, the hearty turnips came eagerly from the soft soil. And what a cheery sight they were: softball-sized globes of firm flesh, with purple flanks and baseball-white undersides. Even so, I'm a recent turnip convert. As root crops, they've got a Russian babushka with chin-whisker image that took me awhile to overcome. Now, I'm hooked. Turnips are a zesty substitute for potatoes when diced for soup and make great "carrot sticks" when sliced lengthwise.

As for the carrots, they were still babies: three inches long, not much bigger around than a fat pencil. But they weren't the bogus "baby carrots" sold in stores. Those are simply big (and tasteless) clunkers that some machine has whittled down to finger size. No, these little fellas were crisp, sweet, tangy -- a delicacy almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

The wind died down later and there was just enough daylight for a late afternoon walk. And, for another incantation of January-thaw mojo. Halfway into my walk, I spotted a rather curious onion by the road, where a snowbank had been. Then another and another until I realized ... they weren't onions. They were flower bulbs. Dozens and dozens of them. Gladiolus, to be precise. I stuffed my windbreaker's pockets until I looked a squirrel with his mouth full of acorns.

It's a mystery that's easily enough explained. There's a gladiolus mail-order house nearby and last summer they farmed a 60-acre field just south of our place. In July, it was awash in a pastel tide of salmon, lavender, raging pink and purple. Then for two weeks in October, an endless convoy of tractors and farm wagons heaped with bulbs rumbled past. Enough excess bounty must have fallen off to turn my garden-variety walk into a cheapskate's treasure hunt.

The next day being Sunday, the church celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany. It's an old Greek word that means manifestation, as in when the gods and godesses made their fearful presence known to mortals. Of course it's presents that we know Epiphany for today, to recall those brought by three Iranian astrologers to a God-child Bethlehem.

Alas that observance has become a forgotten footnote to the cash-register Christmas, which rings in not the holy days but a feast of the marketplace that ends -- instead of begins -- on December 25. By time the seers' dusty camels arrive, we've already stashed our decorations in the attic and hauled the shiny paper to a landfill.

During the priest's homily on Epiphany, my mind wandered (sorry, padre) back to my unexpected gifts from the day before. The carrots, little flowers to be enjoyed at once, orange slivers of instant happiness. The turnips, honest and enduring, could last until real spring if stored in a root cellar or refrigerator. And the gladiolus? The gardening books say my gleaned bulbs won't make it; they should've been dug, dried and stored in a dry place after Halloween.

We'll see. I've seen the pulse of life turn-up where we least expect it. If a dormant garden can still share its gifts in January, why couldn't an orphaned flower bulb find a reason to resurrect in April? Epiphanies aren't just for guys in pointy hats.