Oh Happy Day!

For the last six months Spanky and I have gone out at least three times each week - sometimes as much as five times, for a trail run, snowshoe or xc ski. As I've mentioned before, she was born in June or July and is a Beagle/Border Collie mix, which makes her incredibly smart and of high endurance.

One other characteristic is the joy she experiences being outside and moving - especially in the snow. When she was little, her mission was just to keep up. She would run right on my heels like a little caboose. Whenever I looked back, she'd be right behind me, chugging along, determined.

Then, this fall, she gradually got faster than I am and now takes a more sinuous trail as she sniffs out scents and investigates interesting things. But she's out to run and out to run with me and so she never loses sight of me. This winter, as she's learned to route-find in challenging terrain (see previous post), I often let her lead, calling "Follow You!" (as compared to "Follow Me!"). But regardless of the route or the footwear, she is so filled with happiness and bursting with joy that at times she becomes overwhelmed - or so it seems to me. There are three physical manifestations of her joy that I witness every day:

1. Bounding. She is lean and muscular and while she often runs nose-to-the-ground (her sniffer came in at about age 3mo), she often takes to bounding, with her beagle ears flopping.
2. Dolphin bounding in the snow. This is like diving, but as she's running she'll dive into the snow, nose first, deep enough to bury her head and sometimes shoulders. It's like the way a horse will dive head-down when bucking. She'll lift up and throw snow off her head, but she'll be covered in white powder - usually with a little cap of white snow on top of her black nose which she'll wipe off with her tongue... while running.
3. Oh Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy! This is a crazy move that is so elated, so elevated, so full-to-bursting that it's almost impossible: she'll be running ahead, sniffing and diving and bounding about and suddenly turn 180° and sprint towards me like a bullet. She'll stop short less than 3 feet away, leap on her hind legs, wave her front paws in the air (ears flopping, mouth open) and prance and dance and then run off - sometimes repeating and more often than not putting her front paws up on me and shoving off my hip. Sometimes I grab her paws and we dance a quick jig.

Her joy is palpable. It overwhelms her in the middle of things and she expresses it vividly. And about four times every week, I bask in this glow for one or two hours, and for one or two hours we are carried aloft by a host of angels.

The Forest Fence

I have a 7mo old Beagle/Border Collie mix, a female, named Spanky. I've take her running, snowshoeing & x-c skiing ever since I got her when she was a month old. We've built up her strength and stamina gradually, to the point where, for example, we were out in fresh snow for almost two hours today. For those that have never done a two-hour bushwack in the end of February in the Northeast Kingdom, you have no idea how hard it is.

We alternate between snow shoes and x-c skis depending on our moods or just to change things up a bit.

Here's what we did today: We've been exploring the area bounded by the Rte 2, the Danville-Peacham Road & Oneida Road (Google Map). The pic at the right shows the area. Basically, we explore the region between the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail (marked with green dots) and Oneida Road (marked with blue dots). You might have to click the map to zoom in. We start at the Danville recreation field in town and head through the woods, making a huge loop. Now this may not look that large a territory on the map, but while the goal is merely to find our way to Oneida Rd and back, we have a few things working against us.

1. The woods are a deep, nearly impenetrable forest of red pine, balsam and juniper, interspersed with groves of birch, alder & maple.
2. The terrain is essentially impenetrable woods punctuated by marshes, beaver ponds, swamp & streams. It rolls, with no prominent ridges or hills. There are a few hills that are not more than two stories above the surrounding terrain, but things roll so much it's impossible to tell if you are above or below any reference point.
3. The woods are so dense you cannot follow a straight line and you cannot see the sun much of the time.
4. The snow is about 4ft deep in the woods and any bushwack includes encounters with frequent traps (air pockets made by small trees, brush, grasses, rootballs, branches of fallen trees, etc. that cause you to drop knee-deep or hip-deep without warning and grab hold of your snowshoes). A little dog has severe challenges and must learn quickly to read the snow.
5. The trees grow so close in places that they form walls, making the route maze-like, and on very overcast days makes it difficult to maintain a sense of direction.
   
6. We don't bring a compass.

Spanky has learned to detect traps and streams (she lets me pack a trail over snow-bridges - places where the snow drifts across the stream making a relatively firm crossing). She also is getting very good at choosing routes that don't required pushing through immovable branches. This seems obvious, but for a human it is very challenging. Dogs are more flexible, but it's still a huge inconvenience.

Today we made four major marsh crossings and found a beaver dam that appeared to be about 200ft long and about 6ft wide. There is so much snow out there that it's hard to tell where the dam started and ended, and we encountered it while tramping across the pond - hitting it somewhere in the middle. We also found a huge birch grove that I'd never seen before.

We were not able to find a little hill that I found two days ago before the big snow - it was about 30ft above a marsh and very steep - an odd little pimple thing. It was also heavily tree-covered.

We'll try again.

Town Meeting: Rev Your Engines!

At a nearby restaurant, while finishing my coffee, a neighbor approached and sat for a minute to talk about next Tuesday. He said "You saw the warning, right? You saw article 27 about the $15k for the Danville Historical Society?". I admitted I hadn't gotten that far. He said "How the hell can they ask the voters to just give them fifteen grand when they can't pay their bills?".

I admitted that sounded suspect. He added "If the bank won't lend them the money, there's no reason why the Town should just throw it away. I'm sure to speak out against that one."

It's like listening to the kids leaving the highschool lot at the end of the day. They wait at the end of the school driveway and rev their engines and then shoot out onto the Peacham Road, spitting gravel. We're revving our engines and on Tuesday the gravel will fly.

Getting Ready for Town Meeting: The Town Report

I picked up a copy of the Danville Town Report last Saturday when my wife and I stopped for breakfast at the Danville Inn. We don't need menus and we don't get any. Katie says "Hi" and pours us coffee (my cup gets warmed with decaf) and my wife orders a plate-sized blueberry pancake with bacon and I get two fried eggs over-medium with the homemade toast. Katie says "White or -----" and she says the type and I always forget. It's like "maple oat" or "whole wheat molasses" or "oat something". I never remember so I always order the eggs with the "homemade toast" and let Katie ask me which kind.

The jam choices are always the same: Strawberry and Orange Marmalade. [Note: in german, a traffic "jam" is a verkhers marmalade].

The Inn is owned by Steve Cobb, who handles the microphone in the school gym as people rise to say their opinion. He makes sure everyone gets their voice heard and by jeezum he's got some stuff to say this year and as I wiped my plate clean with the oat-something bread, he told me his plan.

Now I have to say, this sounds catty, but I've been waiting an entire year plotting my "Robert's Rules" strategy for the coming Town Meeting. I sometimes practice it and practice counter-tactics. Every now and then I have to think up a strategy, some of which requires that the Moderator know his "Rules". If he does, I think I can pull off a move. If not, I'm sunk unless I call a "Mr. Moderator, a point of order" to instruct him in The Rules.

Here's an example: If anyone, during the discussion of a motion, "calls the question", the house is immediately polled (no further discussion is allowed) on whether or not they want to end debate and put the question being discussed to a vote. Whether the house votes "yea" or "nay" is immaterial. It allows me to gauge the interest in the debate.

One year. That's all we have. We have our jobs and our lives and our interests and concerns and the Town Report and dang if we won't mull and ponder and plot and scheme and as soon as Town Meeting comes, I can tell you right where I'll be sitting: 3/4 the way toward the back of the bleachers in the gym, sort of to the left (from the moderator's perspective). And at lunch I'll have the baked ham and slaw and potato salad and cranberry relish and the rolls and butter and a chocolate milk.

The Town Report is out.

Getting Ready for Town Meeting: 4 Degrees of Separation

My brother was having dinner two nights ago at a restaurant near his home town of Airmont, New York. Now this is quite far from Danville, Vermont - my hometown. It was my brother & his wife, a friend and her husband, and another couple (friends of the friends). During the conversation my brother Matt said "My nieces are visiting my brother in Danville, Vermont". The friend-of-a-friend's husband said "Hey, my brother lives in Danville, Vermont". After relating the incident and the names, it turns out that my stepson had a mad crush on the daughter of the brother of the friend of the friend's husband. So to recap: The husband of a friend of a friend of my brother's second wife is the father of a girl that the son of my seconds wife had a crush on back in third grade.

And yet, we go to town meeting every year, and just within the town are these stories - going back centuries. There are people in my town that vote a certain way because of some relationship gone sour over a hundred years ago. It's not the Hatfields and McCoys, it's just Danville. And as a postscript to this paragraph I should point out that the newcomers to town make the case for their perspective at Town Meeting and wouldn't you know it but all the regulars label them "n00b" and off we go. It's a "you hadd be there" day like none you've ever seen.

Shaped by Wind

The winds are howling right now, reshaping the snow
Around corners, drifts and fencelines
And it makes the horses nervous.

My carved snowbanks along the driveway
Get sculpted by the wind,
And all winter I wait for these days
To rework my art.

Like driftwood or 'found' art,
My wind-sculpted snowbanks
Are happy to be looked at,
Or hacked with the shovel
Whose lines they smooth
And rework in madness.

The Wedding Cake

There is very little to obsess about in the winter other than the management of snow. Snow and ice - and cold and wind and all that, but among the greatest obsessions is managing snow. More specifically, driveway snow.

A good friend of mine plays golf obsessively, and I find his stories pretty interesting even though I don't play the game. I think it's his enthusiasm. I have no such energy or personal irony or sense of timing or story-telling or whatever it is that makes a dull subject interesting. I go out and shovel my snow and clear and manage the snow banks and shape them and make their tops even and adjust them for cascading powder or sleet and move them back when they begin to encroach and cut them down a foot or two when they get too tall. That's about it.

My golf friend suggested that I find something about snowbanks that most people wouldn't know, but I think most of those things people also wouldn't care about. Here are a few, but I'm getting tired just writing about them:

• Granular snow or cold, dry snow flow like sand and cannot be stacked steeper than their angle of repose, which depends on crystal structure, free water and other stuff. So if you start your snowbank to close to the house or fence, it won't stack up too high at first.
• Piled snow is denser than fresh snow, and as it sits it compresses. It also sinters. After a few weeks you should be able to carve a vertical wall into a snowbank and it should hold. Often after only a week and infrequently, with wet snow, within a day. This means you can let your snowbanks encroach on your driveway intially, and then when they reach a few feet in height, cut them back with vertical sides. You pack more snow in that way.
  
• Frozen wet snow is impossible to cut with a shovel initially. After a month or two though you'll find it will have turned to 'sugar' and will cut with a metal spade or shovel. This will often happen to the bottom of the pile, even to dry powder which absorbs water vapor from the ground and turns to a sugary, sleet-like substance.
  
• Wind-crust or wet snow on top of dry snow forms unstable slabs that will crack and slide. Break them off manually so you don't have surprises later or while you're shoveling.
• Snowblowers and shovels naturally throw snow in a ballistic trajectory. This shapes your snowbanks like parabolas with a negative quadratic coefficient (upside down). If your banks get too tall and you cut them back into vertical walls, you won't be able to throw snow over them. Instead, cut them back in terraces like layered wedding cake. Each terrace will be recessed from the one below, naturally forming a parabolic arc and also will catch snow sliding from the terrace above until they eventually fill in.
• As long as you have your snowblower out, take the time to shave your banks and reblow the snow. A snowblower leaves around 10-20% of the snow short of the maximum distance it can throw, but that means 80-90% will go far. Cutting the banks and re-blowing redistributes most of the snow farther from the edge of the driveway.
• Don't pretend like re-blowing snow is bad. Even on a first cut. You can use the tool to move the snow downwind or up the driveway or whatever even if it means throwing it where you still haven't passed.
• When possible, move snow toward the road. The town plows will be cutting back roadside snowbanks from time to time and this means much less snow you'll have to manage.... of course, you should always put the snow on the right-hand side (facing the road from the driveway) so the plows move it down the road away from your driveway.

I guess that's about all I know about golf.