East Main Road to Hell

This past Thursday I had the misfortune to have to call the Portsmouth police for the second time in four days. The first time was actually kind of exciting, and I got to feel like a do-gooder and all that fuzzy stuff (see my previous post). This time, not so much. In fact, not at all.

After an entertaining afternoon with my elfin younger granddaughter, Olivia, I was heading homeward down East Main Road - that very same island artery up which I had tracked the erratic driver described in the aforementioned post. It was around 6:00 pm, well after sunset, dark and damp. I was in the right-hand southbound lane, moving along with the moderate-to-heavy traffic stream, just past the fire station.

Abruptly, there was a large - Labrador-sized - black dog right in front of my truck, running for the right-hand shoulder. There wasn't even time to brake or swerve - there was a solid thump from the right front, and yelping fading behind me as I frantically looked for a place to pull over. The headlights of the vehicles behind me obscured any sight of the poor creature, and I desperately prayed that he'd been thrown to the shoulder and not hit by subsequent cars.

The split second just before impact kept flashing through my mind: the dog had been moving fast, and was actually well to the right by the time I hit him. Was it possible that the bumper had hit his hindquarters, rather than midsection? Would the consequences have been less dire? The yelping I'd heard made me think that the blow at least hadn't knocked the wind out of him, but broken bones seemed unavoidable.

Looking for a way off the road, but nervous about making a sudden turn into a driveway with traffic close behind me, it seemed as if I'd gone a mile before I spotted the parking lot at Moriarty's Invisible Fence. I flicked on my turn signal and pulled off into the driveway. With shaking hands, I tapped in 911 and asked for the Portsmouth police. Tearfully, I told the dispatcher what had happened, where I was, and where I thought the accident had happened.

As I waited for the officers to come, I succumbed to a case of the fidgets, which I somewhat subdued by turning the truck around so I'd be facing the road and could see the cruiser coming. Still consumed by anxiety, I decided to take a look at the front of the truck, even though I dreaded what might be found. Mercifully, the cruiser arrived just as I had set the parking brake and unbuckled.

The officer listened to my disjointed account sympathetically. After trying to pinpoint where he might find the dog, he handed me a clipboard to write out my incident report, and took himself off on foot in the direction from which I'd come. Miserably, I wrote it all out as plainly as possible - just the facts, ma'am - and signed my name. By that time, the officer had returned, still shining his flashlight around. He'd hiked all the way back to the police/fire station - which actually was not that far up the road - and beyond, then back, without finding a sign of the dog.
I handed back his clipboard.

"Maybe he's a tough guy," he said optimistically, just as the patrol car's radio came to life again. After a short conversation, he turned back to me with bad news - there'd been another report of a dog being hit in the same area. As he left to answer that call, he urged me to take it easy on the way home.

I did, acknowledging how shaken I was. But that last bit of news kept my mind churning all the way. Had the second report been prompted by another accident involving the same dog? Or was it a second report of the same incident? Could the dog have somehow kept his feet and wandered back into the road? If so, how could the officer have missed him in his careful backtracking?

My heart ached for the humans who belonged to that dog. In the headlights, that black coat had the glossy sheen of a well-cared-for animal from a good home. What mischance had put him on busy East Main Road in end-of-day traffic?

Over the years, I've lost a cat and two dogs to cars. In no case did the driver stop or report the accident. I'd just learned firsthand that it's just about impossible not to know that I had hit the dog - even if I hadn't seen him, that thump still echoes in my mind. And it could just as easily have been a person - several years ago, a friend was killed on a dark road in Louisiana when his motorcycle went off the road. As he was scrambling to his feet, he was hit by a pickup, then hit again by a second truck just behind the first. Neither one stopped. Local authorities opined that the drivers probably thought they'd hit an animal.

When I got home, there were two wagging tails waiting for me - my dog Tucker, and my granddog Nicki, visiting while my daughter was out of town. And that's when I finally lost it.

The Road to Portsmouth Is Paved with Good Intentions

Esmerelda is my girly green Ranger, all tricked out with a matching cap, a.k.a. the Mobile Executive Doghouse. She's shown below having a grille-to-grille rendezvous with a studly Rolls in the Walmart parking lot. Yep, that's a Pizza Hut across the street. Only in Newport.

But sometimes duty calls me to one of the other island communities, or even (gasp!) across the bridges to The Other Side. Today I was en route to a meeting in Portsmouth, on the North end of the island, about 20 minutes from my house. Esmerelda was purring along on East Main Road, keeping me amused with the latest from NPR. A light rain dotted her windshield, so she swatted it away with her wipers. The midday traffic was light to moderate as we neared the Middletown-Portsmouth line. We were cruising in the left travel lane, since I planned to hang a left at Union Street fairly soon.

Then the small black SUV up ahead of me in the right lane busted a move that jolted me out of my comfort zone. With plenty of room, it drifted into the left lane in front of me - and kept on going until its driver's side wheels were on the wrong side of the double yellow center line. And stayed there for a few ticks. Then drifted back until the vehicle was straddling the lane divider. Then back to the left lane for a bit, then back over the center line again.

I punched the radio off and patted my Bluetooth earpiece to be sure it was well seated. With left hand firmly on the wheel, I dipped into my pocket, pulled out my trusty iPhone, and thumbed up the phone keypad. 911, then Call. I'm not too sure whether the black SUV had picked up speed, or I had slowed down, but the gap between us had grown too wide for me to be able to read the license plate. While I was squinting at it, the 911 operator said something, so I announced that I was following an erratic driver on East Main Road in Portsmouth. Just for emphasis, the black SUV crossed completely into the oncoming lane - all four tires rolling in the wrong direction. "Oh crap!" I explained calmly. The operator promptly patched me through to the Portsmouth police.

The black SUV blew through the light where I'd planned to turn left, so I stayed on its track, reeling off a play-by-play color commentary to the Portsmouth dispatcher, punctuated by landmarks: "He's in the middle of both northbound lanes . . . We're just passing Rocco's Pizza . . . Moriarty's Invisible Fence . . . Over the center line again . . . I'm at the fire station . . ." As we crested Quaker Hill and started down toward the fork at the bank, one car, then another pulled into the left lane between me and the subject of my phone conversation.  I described Esmerelda to the dispatcher and counted out my plate number. The light at the intersection turned green as the black SUV took the left fork, followed by - now - three cars, then me in Esmerelda, still talking to the dispatcher. As I cleared the intersection, I glanced in my rear-view mirror for the first time in I don't know when, and saw that I had a cruiser right on my tailgate - yay! I got eyes front just in time to see the object of our pursuit go all the way into the oncoming lane again, even as I was wondering if the guy was gonna make a liar of me now that the cops were there. My escort hit his lights and blew past me in the breakdown lane, followed by a second cruiser that I hadn't even seen.

"They've got him!" I yelled to the dispatcher, who politely thanked me for my help and let me go without asking if I was using a hands-free device. As we passed, I gave a conspiratorial wave to the two officers who were directing traffic around the stopped SUV and the two police vehicles. Then I noticed that Esmerelda's inspection sticker is out of date. I gave her dashboard a pat, promised I'd take care of the sticker thing this week, and grinned the rest of the way to my meeting.

Newport Gone Wild?

Here I sit, using a fine-toothed comb to remove a few hundred stubborn clinging little seed pods that have hooked themselves into my fleece pullover and lounge pants. I was attacked by the tiny cling-ons when I waded into my weed-infested back lot to resolve a standoff between my dog Tucker and an alien intruder perched atop the 8-foot back fence. Tucker is the clever canine who so suavely advised me how to handle the bears on the porch in the dream recounted in my last post.

Tucker's got a touch of the wild himself, being an Australian kelpie, or kelpie/cattle dog mix. Either way, he's 100% herding dog, with the body type, genetic trace, and impressive incisors of a dingo, a true proto dog. His beautiful coat is a remarkable all-season personal environment; I have so much respect for its rain-forest-like perfect balance that I've never bathed Tucker, or needed to. But I did have to give him a thorough brushing tonight to get rid of the same seeds that adorned me.

So I was happily - well, not so happily, but okay about it - updating one of the websites I'm mistress of, when Tucker sounded off, and off, and off in the back lot. He has several voices, and this one was the "There's an alien species trying to breach the border of my territory." This is becoming more and more common around here, and it's never a good thing. Interesting, sometimes - like the young possum Tuckie treed in the lilac, but that's a rarity.

Long ago, Tucker appointed himself the neighborhood skunk warden, and I'm pleased to say that there have been very few whiffs around this summer. I should note that Rhode Island may very well have the highest skunk count per square mile of any state in the Union. I used to explain to my Mom that Rhode Island was the only state in the country that had a bivalve (the quahog) as the state bird, and a rodent (the skunk) as the state flower. But the downside of Tucker's anti-skunk campaign is that other species have moved in as the skunks have relocated.

There are possums, as previously mentioned. They've been in the neighborhood for at least five years now. Deer are fairly common on the island, but it's still a surprise to hear of sightings in the city. However, Tucker has located and perfumed himself with deer poop in city parks on two occasions, and let me tell you, it's beyond nasty, plus it has a half-life of many months.

Hawks live in the higher reaches of Newport's church towers. Foxes abound all along the shoreline of the island. Glossy ibis and tricolor herons and swans inhabit our wetlands. The wild turkey population is exploding, and Canada geese are everywhere, carpet-bombing grassy areas with Yorkie-sized poops. There's a well-established mink colony at Sachuest Point.

And the Eastern coyotes - well, the island now sports multiple packs. My son-in-law, Diesel Mike, reports coyote sightings on Bellevue Avenue on almost every one of his daily lunchtime circuits of the Ten-Mile Drive. Over on the Navy base, you can sit on the deck at the Chiefs' Club at sunset and listen to the local pack sing along with the amplified broadcast of Taps. They are widely believed to be responsible for the rising rate of pet cat disappearances. Why, I ask, why can't they prey on all those damn geese?

Raccoons used to live under the porch of the Elks Lodge a block over, but were rousted and went elsewhere. Apparently "elsewhere" was somewhere in, around, or under an unoccupied multi-unit house on Prospect Hill St., which runs up to Bellevue behind my house. Now the multi-unit is being totally rehabbed, and it seems the 'coons are on the street again. My neighbors have found scat in their yard, and a fairly hefty animal broke a branch, flattening a mound of hostas beneath it.

So, while Tucker was trying to dislodge the critter atop the fence, I called my neighbor two doors down, whose back fence continues mine. As she flashlit her way to her back fence to get a look at whatever it was, she mentioned that the neighbor three doors down had recently seen a fisher cat descending a nearby tree trunk. He ID'd the dimly seen animal as a fisher cat because it was climbing down headfirst, an unusual ability made possible by its sharp-clawed hind paws, which can swivel 180 degrees.

"Fisher cat" is a New-Englandism; the animal's name is actually just fisher, a colloquialization of the French word fichet, a European polecat. It's a member of the Mustelids, which include wolverines, weasels, and those cute little ferrets. Adult fishers are similar in size and coloring to raccoons, although there's no relationship. Head and ear shapes are similar, and both varmints have long, bushy tails. 'Coons, of course, have the distinctive eye mask and ringed tail, which fishers do not. And just like the aforementioned Eastern coyotes, the fisher population in Rhode Island has gone from zero to thriving in recent years. Reports of fisher attacks on dogs and other domestic animals have piled up from all over the state, reinforcing their ferocious reputation.

Still, I hadn't heard of fishers on the island up until now. I tried to get some more light on the animal with my headlamp and flashlight, but couldn't get a good look at its face because it was backlit by security lights on an adjacent building. Nor could I see a tail of any kind, ringed or otherwise. Meanwhile, Tucker was still growling and barking fiercely, lunging at the fence below the critter, which wasn't budging. My neighbor, still on the phone as she tried to get a look through a screen of tree branches, said she thought she saw a mask. That made me a little less anxious - if I had to choose between a raccoon and a fisher, I'd vote for the raccoon any day, in spite of their known ability to kill a dog or cat if cornered.

To try to break the standoff, I picked up the hoe that lives next to my compost bin, waded deeper into the weeds, and gave the fence a couple of good whacks. The critter apparently didn't like the vibrations and noise, because it started creeping toward the junction of my fence with the neighbors', giving my neighbor a somewhat better view. She confirmed that it was indeed a raccoon, to the relief of both of us.

As the 'coon continued its meander out of his territory, Tucker elected to stand down and finally come to my call. Whew! I shooed him back into the house, gave him some well-deserved treats for a job well done, brushed the grabby seeds out of his coat, and settled in to remove same from my garments. Then I followed up by googling fishers and raccoons, which answered some questions - are there fishers in Little Rhody? Yep. Are they really bad-asses? Kinda. Can raccoons go down a tree headfirst? Aha! Yes, they can, for the same reason as fishers, so the recent sighting might have been a raccoon. Are there fishers living on Aquidneck Island, in my neighborhood? Can't answer that one yet, but I'd sure like to know. Stay tuned!

Bears on the Porch, Oh My!

So there I was, tucked up all cozy in my bed, snoozing peacefully. The dream movie was spooling along as usual, little bits of this and that, not much of note. Then a familiar scene brightened the "screen" - I was in my girly green Ranger, accompanied by my daughter Meredith. We'd been somewhere unspecified, and were now pulling up in front of my house. I glanced up at the front porch, a 10' by 10' space reached by 5 broad granite steps. OMG! The porch and upper steps were a heaving mass of BEARS! It was hard to tell exactly how many, but at least three - one a golden brown, and the rest black. They seemed to be wrestling playfully, and somehow I knew - although I couldn't see him - that my dog Tucker was in the midst of the roiling scrum.

Thinking fast, I asked Meredith to reach through the back slider and open the tailgate so I could call Tucker to safety in the back of the truck. Of course, I'd asked the impossible - it's a long-bed truck, and the sliders in the cab and cap are too small for any adult human to lean through, much less reach the distant tailgate. But dreams have their own logic, and somehow the tailgate got opened anyway.

I yelled "Load up!" Bursting from the writhing mountain of bear fur, Tucker bounded onto the tailgate and dog-trotted forward to the slider, where he advised us that we should call the city animal control officer (he speaks very well for a dingo). Right! I started punching buttons on my cell phone, but somehow managed to hit all the wrong keys on each attempt. Frustrated, I jumped out of the truck and ran around the corner to an imaginary real estate office, where I commandeered a desk phone and punched in the police emergency number.

As I did so, I glanced out the bay window and saw a whole crew of EBTs (Emergency Bear Technicians) in the open-front office next door, wrangling several heavily sedated bears onto gurneys so they could be loaded into the flashing rescue trucks lined up outside on fashionable Bellevue Avenue. How the EBTs and bears got there so fast is a dream mystery, never to be solved. The bears were passed out cold on their backs, paws in air, tongues lolling out, soaked in sweat after all that rasslin'.

Right about then, someone answered the phone at the police station. I assured them that the EBTs were already on the scene, but that the environmental people might want to know, because a sweaty bear is a stinky bear. As I started fretting about how to clean the stinky bear sweat off my porch, Tucker rolled over and had a nice morning stretch at the end of my bed, herding the bears off to the dream archives. Good doggie!

Street to the Heart

This is soooo cool! This link doesn't need any more words from me, cuz the pictures are worth 10,000 times more!

Bren Bataclan's Random Acts of Happy Art


Go forth and do likewise!

Table for Eight

There were eight of us hardy campers, just in from the wilds of Maine’s West Branch region, where we’d hung out with timber tigers (red squirrels), survived a bear alert (never saw one), and rafted the Class 5 rapids of the West Branch of the Penobscot. As all campers know, the rules of polite society are shucked as soon as the tent is pitched. Belching, scratching, and farting are all allowed (aloud!), even encouraged.

We did have one little lapse into etiquette while rafting. We’d just done the 10-foot drop down Nesowadnohunk Falls, and had pulled off to the edge of the stream to bail the raft. A snazzy white Crabapple Adventures raft bounced out of the foam at the bottom of the Falls and pulled over next to us. Robert, one of our party, glanced over and politely inquired, in the words of a popular mustard commercial of the time, “Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?”

His question was met with blank stares from the Crabapple raft. Amy, Robert’s sister-in-law, smacked Robert smartly with her paddle and barked, “You idiot – they’re Canadian!”

Back to the story: so after 5 glorious days in the wilderness, the eight of us – 4 men, 4 women – had moved camp to Seawall Campground on Mount Desert Island, home to some of Maine’s tonier Downeast communities. Seawall Campground is a lovely coastal campground run by the U. S. Park Service. It has fire rings and flush toilets, and features slide shows by the rangers on occasion.

That night’s slide show was an introduction to Seawall Campground and coastal Maine in general. Geared to the younger members of the audience, the show began with a series of contrast slides on animals and where you’d not expect to find them.

Ranger: “Would you expect to find this…”
Slide: a camel
Ranger: “...here?”
Slide: the frozen north
Kids: “Nooooo!”

Ranger: “Would you expect to find this…”
Slide: a red squirrel
Ranger: “...here?”
Slide: coral reef scene
Kids: “Nooooo!”

Ranger: “Would you expect to find this…”
Slide: a whale
Ranger: “...here?”
Slide: vast desert spaces
Kids: “Nooooo!”

Ranger: “Would you expect to find this…”
Slide: a big ol’ rhinoceros
Ranger: “...here?”
Slide: the sign at the entrance to Seawall Campground
Karen, into Shaun’s ear (having recently seen The Gods Must Be Crazy, with its campfire-stomping rhino fire warden): “Nooooo – we’d lose our fire!”

Shaun, in hysterics, fell off the log bench, disrupting the show until he managed to get a grip again.

Back to the story: so there we were, the eight of us, and we’d seen the slide show, slaked our thirst, and decided we were up for a meal that somebody else had cooked. So off we went to a colorful little lobster boil eatery called Duddy’s, in nearby Bass Harbor (pronounced HAH-bah).

Shaun and I had dined there on a previous trip, finding the food tasty and the waitress – well, she was cool. She sat down at our table and told us her life story. We had the impression that this wasn’t uncommon at Duddy’s. Some of the other wait staff looked like they might have been on work-release.

So Duddy’s was an appropriate choice for a bunch of hygienically challenged campers looking for a good feed. We were ushered into the Large Group room, which featured two long tables which neatly seated eight each. The other one was already occupied by another party of eight, but the head count was the only similarity. Male and female alike, they were attired in khakis, Topsiders without socks, and polo shirts. We guessed that they were slumming from Northeast Hahbah or Bah Hahbah.

We lost no time ordering mass quantities of mollusks, crustaceans, and beer, which we fell upon ravenously. It was in the relative silence created by the first wave of ingestion that the neighboring table began to make its presence known. Although there was a form of general conversation going on over there, the woman at the head of the table had something important to say, and by God, she was going to make sure everyone heard it. Her braying became louder and louder, occasioning some irked looks around our table as she began to dominate our conversation as well.

Our waitress arrived to clear away the first round of debris by the simple expedient of pulling up a trash can and sweeping the throwaways right off the table into it. She was handing around the next set of plates when a booming pronouncement from the dominatrix of the next table stopped us all cold.

“So there I was, trapped between the fourth and fifth astral plane, and couldn’t get back to my body!”

That’s when the madness took me. I leaned over to Polly, next to me at the end of the table, and said, “Campers’ Rules. No holds barred. Pass it on!” She did.

There ensued such a cacophony of belching, slurping, farting, and general rudeness that the waitress collapsed against the doorframe in hysterics. I should note that all this was from the women of our party. The men, who certainly had not been deficient in the noxious emissions department earlier in the trip, seemed unable to muster up as much as a mouse fart, and had to settle for singing extremely bawdy sea chanteys at the top of their lungs. Our table of eight had dispatched the khaki-wearers to their own astral plane, leaving us in clear possession of ours.

Seagulls

Spindrift is one of those things that sounds a great deal more romantic than it is. I can always tell when it's spindrift weather by watching the seagulls. There's a point of wind velocity when a sensible gull figures it's pure foolishness to go aloft; another notch higher on the anemometer and he won’t even try to stand up. When you can see hundreds of gulls but no gull feet, it's spindrift time. The air will be full of little blobs of dirty suds scudding past and skittering along the shore, rafting up in trembling yellowish clots. The gulls hunker down in feathered stoicism, beaks dead into the wind, blinking and flicking their wings as the occasional bits of foam bounce off them.

Now, a hunkered-down gull is nothing but pure appetite tacked to a rock. The longer the blow goes on, the hungrier the gull gets. It's a good thing the coast is littered with gull goodies after a gale; by the time the storm ends, the seagulls are running on empty, and heaven help the creature that gets between them and the beach buffet.

On the New England coast, you're more likely to be bedeviled by gulls than by ants when you picnic. Of course, the gulls have a vast natural advantage, hanging up there on the high breezes, taking inventory of your menu with that preternaturally acute vision of theirs; then, mewing approval, they'll plummet abruptly to a landing just out of reach, where they strut and preen and yammer and nag until someone finally tosses a tidbit into the crowd - then all hell breaks loose. Flipping a single pickle chip into a dozen-gull flock is about the same as dropping a meatball into a school of feeding sharks. The winner and all the sore losers will then scream hideous slanders about the morals of your immediate ancestors, until bribed by more goodies. In no time at all, you'll find your feast stripped of all its trimmings, while you gnaw guiltily at the last chicken leg under the gimlet gaze of your feathered luncheon guests, who are, of course, waiting for the bone.

Gulls are such dedicated omnivores. I once shared a sunny half-hour on a dock with a gull that was dead-set on ingesting a smallish, extremely dead yellowtail flounder that had evidently been sun-baked to the hardness of cold-rolled steel. If it had been, say, a skinny little smelt or such, maybe he could have choked it down; but that broad, flat flounder oval was more than he could get his beak around. Not that he didn’t try to whittle it down to size, worrying away at the edges with that scissor-edged beak, but to no avail. He was still gnawing when I left.

The sheer capacity of the individual gull is staggering, as illustrated by the case of the deep-dish apple-rhubarb pie. There had been more than half of it left after the three of us Maine campers had had a piece, but then Sam the dog took an unauthorized sample, and the third of a pie that was left lost its appeal for the rest of us. But we figured Oscar would appreciate it.

The cabin was perched precariously on a rocky hillside that pitched steeply down to the frigid waters of Prettymarsh Harbor; seven or eight camps are tucked away, all but invisible, in the pines that ring the cobbled shore. You can hear a screen door slam on the far side of the water, or a fish break the surface half a mile away. Oscar easily picked up our cocktail-hour chitchat and cruised in from the spiraling thermal where he’d been hang-gliding.

Oscar was a standard-model herring gull with a brassy self-assurance that brought him daily to our porch railing for hors d'oeuvres and idle gossip. Deep-dish apple-rhubarb pie being a rarity in those parts, we figured it would get him even more excited than his usual handouts of popcorn and crackers. Wanting a ringside view of the action, we carefully laid out a tempting trail of pie bits, starting at his usual landing spot at the far end of the rail, and ending at the pie plate, which was stage center on the rail in front of our chairs. Sure enough, Oscar ate his way down the rail, morsel by morsel, watching us with yellow-eyed suspicion as he inched closer - three more bites, two, then only one - Oscar stalled momentarily, but gluttony beat out caution and he pounced on the pie with a croak of glee. Carefully pinning down his prize by planting one webbed foot firmly on the edge of the foil plate, he scissored out one hunk of pie after another and gulped it down until there wasn't a crumb left. Then, as if to show us he still wasn't full, he gave the plate a couple of good chomps before tossing it disdainfully at our feet. His takeoff was a bit sluggish, but a deep-dish pie is serious ballast, after all. Fortunately, he cleared the porch before he blew the ballast tanks.

The beggarly nature of seagulls makes them easy marks for the likes of the TOWN & COUNTRY photographer who was doing a high-fashion shoot on the Newport gold coast. The scenario called for a Christmas picnic by the sea, so the boulders at Price's Neck were artfully sprinkled with flaked Styrofoam to simulate drifting snow. Out of camera range, a truckload of ice-cubes lay heaped on the beach, chilling a case of champagne and a couple of dozen baskets of strawberries. More ice cubes were tucked into a hollow in the rocks, cradling two bottles of champagne and a pretty bowl of berries; right next to it crackled a healthy bonfire. Draped over the rocks by the fire and ice was the sleek daughter of an old and wealthy Newport family, tastefully arrayed in a fisherman's sweater, faded jeans, and an ankle-length lynx coat. It was August.

Various artistic types clambered over the rocks, adjusting lights and grooming the lounging heiress. Just across the little cove waited the extras, a couple of dozen gulls milling around peevishly and squabbling amongst themselves. They’d been primed for action with a handout of day-old bread tossed by two flunkies standing on the sidelines of the shot. Every time the photographer had a shot framed and lit to his satisfaction, he’d call "Gulls!", the flunkies would heave hunks of bird bait into the air, and the sky behind the shot would immediately fill with flashing black-and-white wings. Turned out the ratio of bread to film had been sorely miscalculated, though; the bread ran out early, as did a couple of bags of potato chips. In the end, economy was flung to the winds and the strawberries were flung to the seagulls, basket after succulent basket.

Marie Antoinette would have appreciated the solution.

Flight Feathers

Manhattan: July, 1984. A filthy-hot Sunday afternoon in Soho, prime time for gallery-hopping. The kulturati were stalking their prey from boutique to gallery to showroom, ready to swoop in for the kill; the sidewalks were aswirl with trendy humanity. On West Broadway, there was a string trio playing in the open window of the restaurant/gallery Central Falls. Farther up the street, live mannequins robot-danced in the show window of a boutique, to the giggles of a crowd outside. The street kids splashed color all over the streets with their fluorescent hair, face paint, and funny sox, lounging on corners and stoops, watching and posing, smoking suspect cigarettes and letting on they were bored.

My Australian friends, attracted by a high-voltage window display, wandered into a big boutique on Spring Street. Since I’d more or less appointed myself tour guide, I followed, relieved to be getting out of the sun, but not overly thrilled at the decibel level in the place. A real, honest-to-God disquaire stood behind a bank of fancy electronics, pumping non-stop New Sound into the shop.

From there, though, things started looking a bit better. Not far from the front door, a pretty cat was curled into a furry cushion on the seat of a tall chair. A chattering sound penetrated the curtain of disco; I traced it to a pair of black-faced lovebirds in a cage hung amidst greenery. Not far from them was another cage with a pair of Amazon parrots. Still another snoozing kitty turned up farther on. How astonishing to find all these creatures amidst the blare and jostle!

I turned around to look for my friends, and found myself face-to-face with a really big cage – big enough that I couldn’t at first locate its resident, who blended beautifully into the green of the ficus tree beyond. His stillness didn’t betray him, but the patch of maroon feathers above his beak did – a very handsome military macaw, with all the dignity of considerable size.

I spoke to him in macaw, a language I’d been well schooled in by my own feathered child, Panama Red. The big fellow didn’t respond. I moved around the cage to get closer. He straightened up, flattened the feathers down tight on his head, and looked at me with what seemed to be alarm. Poor thing! I spoke again, as soothingly as I could, in English and in macaw, running on in a sort of chant of reassurance, getting as close as I could so I wouldn’t have to speak over the pounding sounds filling the air. Gradually, the head feathers started to lift. His pupils dilated, calming his gaze. He inspected me, leaning a bit in my direction. I circled back to the end of the perch that didn’t terminate by the ficus tree; I’m not crazy about lurking in the shrubbery, particularly not the indoor kind.

He took a couple of steps away from the ficus tree end and gave himself a good shake, fluffing his feathers still more. The forward head feathers were standing well up by now, a sure sign that a parrot is feeling friendly. I poked a couple of fingers through the bars in a scratching motion, still keeping up the idle chit-chat. He split the difference between us, sidling halfway over, and stretching his head toward my hand. Not quite close enough! Another couple of steps, and he was in range. This was the tricky part. I knew all too well from my own big macaw just what that beak could do. Brazil nuts were easy; fingerbones could be too. He nudged my finger with his beak; he stuck out his funny black tongue and licked it. I rubbed his beak lightly; he moved a little closer. I worked my way up the beak to the maroon feathers above, and brushed them gently against the direction they lay. He started a little, then decided I had the right moves and bent his head toward me. Within moments, he’d surrendered completely, closing his eyes blissfully as I scratched under his chin and in back of his eye patches where his ear-holes were.

“OMIGOD DON’T DO THAT HE BITES!”

I jumped, and so did my new friend. Between the thick disco and the thick carpeting, I hadn’t heard this guy, salesman or manager or whatever, coming.

“He does not,” I snapped, surprised by my own temper, holding up my hand to prove it was intact. “He’s sweet and he’s lonely. I’ll take responsibility for it if he does bite me.” I turned my back on the man and resumed my conversation with the bird.

That brief flash of anger had crystallized a cloud of thoughts – images, really – that had been floating around wordless in my head. It dawned on me that the bird’s initial composure hadn’t been due to dignity, but to depression. He longed, like any other intelligent, social creature, for physical contact and warmth. Even now he was pressed hard against the bars of the cage, crooning hoarse little RRRRRs of pleasure as I scratched. But what he got was an assaultive environment of unremitting noise and humans who wanted nothing to do with him.

What was it, I wondered, that would lead anyone to spend in the neighborhood of $2000 for a living creature that served no purpose except set decoration? A purebred dog or cat costing much less would be a family’s pampered darling, even though equipped with fang and claw worthy of as much respect as a macaw’s beak. A saddle horse could cost as much or more, and would be stroked and groomed and given treats despite the occasional nip or kick. Why, then, should a four-pound bird of beautiful hues and fanciful shape be an untouchable?

I think it’s the feathers. They strike some ancient chord in us, the tribe of furred and hairy creatures; dinosaurs and reptiles were the ancestors of birds, and scales the ancestors of feathers. All scaly pets – fish, lizards, snakes – are kept isolated and on display. Look but don’t touch. Slimy. Cold-blooded. Okay, most people know birds are warm-blooded, but they aren’t like us. They aren’t mammals. They lay eggs like lizards. They have beaks. THEY CAN FLY!

That’s the answer right there. We live among these flying wonders, and a mean small corner of our souls envies that joyous flight. It’s too absurd for us to comprehend. Never mind that it’s just daily business to a bird – it looks like too much fun.

I once confronted that awe of free flight in a half-finished shell of a house by the ocean. A young kestrel had gotten in through some opening or other and couldn’t find his way out. He was a dead bird if I didn’t do something, so I cornered him in a hall and threw my lightweight windbreaker over him. Carefully, I reached in and disentangled him from the fabric, wary of his hawk beak and talons. Oddly, he chose not to struggle or strike; he simply lay on his back in my hand, his black eyes remote, resigned, while I admired him. What a tiny, beautiful, noble creature he was! Mostly I remember the surprising frivolousness of his pretty speckled breast, and the firm, compact feel of his powerful little body in my hand.

I took him outside and set him on the ground. He didn’t move. I began to worry that I might have hurt him when I netted him. I picked him up again, one hand under him, the other lightly on his back, starting to check for injuries. Somehow, I don’t know exactly how, he pushed himself out of my hands and dropped toward the ground. At the very last instant, he fanned his wings and was off with a crack of pinions against air, a single cry ringing behind him.

It is that which we, earthbound in our own bodies, can never do nor ever understand – free flight from free fall. Betcha can’t say that three times fast!

A Long Night's Journey into Day

Nocturnal habits. Four in the morning, and I was thinking about nocturnal habits, which happens to be one of my nocturnal habits. I had a cup of tea and the Sunday Times of London cryptic puzzle, and it was the best of times. No telephone, no traffic noise, no demands on my attention, just velvety night quiet and contentment. Then the dawn bird started up.

There’s always that one bird, always has been, as far back as I can remember, just as the night sky starts to go from black to luminous deep blue. He’s high up in a tree somewhere and gets the hint of coming light before I do. That damn bird always starts up just then, an hour before true dawn, in every place I’ve ever been. The dawn song is distinctive; I know the notes, but I don’t know the singer’s name, his species. But the song is the same, wherever I am, uptown, downtown, crosstown, out of town, out of the country. Maybe it’s the same bird, following the thread of my life like some guardian angel or ancient mariner’s albatross. He was there outside the college dorm in Virginia years ago at finals time. I heard him when I was nine or ten months pregnant, too oddly shaped to find a comfortable position for sleeping and anyway always poised for the next phase. As I leaned on a piling and watched the glassy-still water of Newport harbor turn opalescent, I heard him explain the light shift. As I slapped mosquitoes and raced the spreading light at Third Beach, putting disaster makeup on an actor in a night-time movie scene, he nagged me to go faster. When I strayed back to my tent from a bluegrass festival jam in the woods, he mocked my immoderation.

This is real time this bird deals in, sun time, not calendar time. Standard time, daylight savings time, Greenwich Mean Time in the meantime mean nothing to him. The sun will come regardless. I sigh. I don’t want to know. It means my favorite time has fled again, and all those mundane daylight things are on their way.

The night hours, the dark hours, have their own rhythms. Hospitals have noted that those most delicately balanced at the edge of life are more likely to slip away around 3:00 a.m. than at any other time; the scientific conclusion is that the absence of natural light and the shifts and changes that accompany the sun’s transit create a sort of biological stillness, a slowing of metabolism that can tip a frail balance.

It has also been observed that the onset of the long winter nights of lands far from the equator can trigger deep depression in some people; remember Hamlet, the Melancholy Dane? This depression is treated either by relocating the patient closer to the equator, or more practically, by extending the perceived day by the use of daylight-emulating artificial lighting.

On the other hand, there are those who love the dark hours. I am one, as I’ve explained. There’s an extraordinary sense of freedom in that time for me, a sort of anarchistic glee at the destruction of schedule and routine. The grownups have gone to bed; it’s time to play. Concepts, designs flow effortlessly; problems are solved; ideas are born. What could be work is pure fun.

But there’s serious business going on out there in the dark – not just human business like depression and dying, but the all-in-a-night’s-work, bringing-home-the-bacon sort of business that belongs to the natural night creatures. There are gatherers and crops and hunters and prey. Have you ever been driven mad by a hyperactive hamster in the small hours? The silly little thing is only doing what he would do in the wild, which is gathering food in the dark, when it’s much safer for small furry creatures with wretchedly bad eyesight and very little brain.

But for every gatherer in nature, there seems to be a predator, and the owl is one of the best. Like eagles, hawks, and buzzards, he’s a raptor, with talons meant for seizing prey and a sharp hooked beak for tearing flesh; but unlike his cousins, he’s specially designed for night work. Those great round eyes allow him to hunt by starlight, and heaven help the field mouse who rustles in the grass, because the owl’s keen hearing will surely pick it up.

Imagine him soaring on those great pinions, surveying the landscape as if it were a pastoral smorgasbord, nothing to betray his silent patrol but perhaps a little moonshadow. He likes almost anything in the key of rodent, and since in the rodent world silliness seems to increase as size decreases, field mice are a staple of his diet. I once heard an owl get really lucky, though, just as I was dozing off in a cabin in the Virginia woods. A scream ripped through the inky quiet of the night, a sound so nearly human I know it couldn’t be a wildcat. Maybe it WAS human? In that moment, I learned the exact sensation of having one’s hair stand on end. The sound wasn’t repeated, and I wasn’t about to venture into the copperhead-infested fields to investigate. But late the next afternoon, as I was walking along the far edge of the cornfield, I found the mostly-devoured remains of a recently deceased cottontail. It was the first I knew that rabbits have voices.

There are other mysteries, just as haunting but far more beautiful, that the darkness reveals, like the tiny, phosphorescent creatures that glimmer and sparkle in the friction between ocean and rock, a tiny sea-borne galaxy outlining the night-time shore, or trailing like a comet’s tail in the hissing wake of a sailboat. And for really glorious phosphorescence, nothing beats a school of squid rocketing along just under the surface on a moonless night. One can’t see these things except in the absence of daylight, so when the herald of light, that damnable dawn bird, announces the coming of day, I mourn the end of enchantment. It’s just as well I don’t know his name, his species, for his song always reminds me that in more barbarous times, it was considered good form to kill the bearer of bad tidings. I’d cheerfully add dawn birds to the list of endangered species.

The Bat in the Bedroom

"There's a bat in the bedroom," he said. Oh, sure there was. Turned out he was right, though - there absolutely was a small but very energetic bat up there, obsessively circling the plaster pendant at the peak of the dome, sonar working overtime to guide his angular flight away from the dome's eight planes. It was dramatically gloomy and Gothic way up there above the twelve-foot mark; he looked very Edward Gorey-ish.Waitaminute, you're thinking. Dome? Decent people don't have domed bedrooms with bats flying around. It just isn't done.

Well, hey, I didn't put the thing there, and nobody seems to know who did, or why; all we know is roughly when (about 1890). As a matter of fact, I'd owned the house for four years of pretty intense restoration before we ever laid eyes on it; before the big 'Yikes!" there'd been a dropped Masonite ceiling hanging there letting on that everything was just fine, nice and normal, not to worry, nobody up here but us ceiling panels. Then, in the course of some roof work, we discovered that there was actually plaster and lath up high under the pointy roof of the bedroom wing, way above the dropped ceiling. Down came a ceiling panel, and there, in the cold blue light of a fluorescent lantern, we got our first glimpse of IT, lurking there, huge and alien, like something from inside a mummified dinosaur's chest cavity, eerily organic.

The biggest thing about it is that it's so - well - BIG. Sixteen feet across at the deep cornice girdling the room ten feet from floor level, the dome slopes in eight tall trapezoids to an inverted octagonal bowl shape that tops out at nearly twenty feet off the floor. All this geometry, by the way, is noticeably out of kilter; visually more symmetrical than, say, Stonehenge, but much less centered in concept. The eight plaster panels are framed in heavy plaster ribbing. The centerpiece of the construction is a five-foot-long octagonal stalactite of distinctly phallic contours descending from the heights, neatly finished with a quartet of plaster roses bunched at the tip.

Back to the bat. I mean, he was still there, stuck in a holding pattern that had to be either his dream come true or his worst nightmare - who can tell? He looked great up there - the perfect Gothic garnish. Having a taste for the Gothic, I wouldn't have minded all that much having him stay for a while.

I have a fondness for bats - I guess not shared by very many - that's left over from the summer dusks of my Virginia childhood. We were all equal members of the hunt club in that dim silky twilight. The chimney-swifts and barn swallows would be wrapping up their last shift and heading back to roost as the next shift of bats and small children were coming on. It was lightning bug time, little scribbles of pale greenish-yellow neon rising from the grass, and we kids chased them with gimlet-eyed determination, clutching our icepick-ventilated mayonnaise jars. Overhead, the bats darted and twittered after those fat, arrogant Southern mosquitoes. I confess I never saw a bat take a lightning bug, though - I reckon it wasn't in their food chain. I know, because I watched those fireflies jealously, and I would have known if the bats were poaching. All in all, it was a pretty good working relationship - bats filling their bellies and kids filling their jars.

In the long run, it turned out not to matter that I was sympathetic to the bat in the dome, even though I knew it was only a minor miscalculation in his sonar and an unscreened dark open window that deceived him in the first place. The other household members were muttering darkly, dropping words like "lice" and "rabies" and "guano." Besides, it was bat dinnertime, and I was fresh out of bat chow.

The problem, however, was that shooing a flying beastie out of a room that inconveniently lacked a standard eight-foot ceiling presented a tactical dilemma. I fetched the butterfly net. Take my word for it, every household should have one for such occasions. Mine has three feet of bamboo handle, and if you add that to my maximum upward reach when standing tippy-toe - about seven feet - then tack on another foot for the diameter of the net's hoop, you'll get eleven feet, give or take a couple of inches.

It only took a couple of flailing swipes at the passing bat for me to understand that Plan A wasn't gonna work. The bat read the whishing net with his little squeaks and headed for the safety of the upper air.

A mystery of the brain's workings: "Zen archery" scrolled before my mind's eye. My mind obediently emptied (not a big job at that moment). All by itself, my net-holding arm went up, and the bat was in the net, just like that. I went to the window, held the net out, and off he went. Later, as I sat down to dinner, I said grace for the bat too, assuming that he was grateful for his belated meal.

Aural Perception

The subject line is the giveaway here. If you were hearing, rather than reading the words, you might hear "oral perception," unless the speaker had particularly precise pronunciation (take that, nattering nabobs of negativism!). I bring this up because lately I've been experiencing what one might call auditory misperceptions.

My favorite example: the Honeydew Donuts ad that features folks itemizing the Honeydew treats that light up their day. The final character lists "A large houseplant and a pistachio muffin or two." After the first couple of times I heard this, I made a point of watching the actor's lips carefully, and still can't hear it any differently. I should note that the last time I had my hearing tested, it was exceptionally acute. However, that's no reason to believe that what I perceive is what's in the script. As far as I know, Honeydew doesn't have a garden shop. Best guess? Hazelnut.

Another ad that really grates on my nerves is one for Friendly's, an East Coast ice cream/burger chain. Friendly's commercial tag line is "Where ice cream makes the meal." No nutritional judgments are being made here; the problem is the ad, which features a mini-van full of kids happily singing the catchy Friendly's jingle. Their vocalizations are rapidly overridden by the demented soccer mom who is chauffering the kids. The kids, wide-eyed, fall silent as Mom, who seems to have been dipping into little Tommy's Ritalin, pounds rhythm on the steering wheel and frenetically bounces up and down in her bucket seat, belting out the signature words (rendered phonetically) "wayer ahs creem makes the mee-uhl." This performance is doubly icky. Not only is seeing a crazy person driving a carful of kids quite disturbing, but her pronouncing ice as ahs makes the word seem, unpleasantly, much more like ass than ice. Not so friendly for Friendly's. ICK ICK.

As it happens, I've had some theatre training, and was once complimented on how beautifully I enunciate the Queen's English, so I have a very modest claim to knowing what I'm discussing. From my viewpoint, one would hope that actors who are cast in commercials would be highly motivated to enunciate well for three reasons:

• optimizing perception of the product being advertised, leading to
  
• further commercial acting opportunities, leading to
  
• those lovely residuals.

Unfortunately, I've noticed some trends, particularly in television commercials, that either ignore or glorify mispronunciation of basic American English word elements. This doesn't have anything to do with the linguistic regionalisms that one hears in local advertising. It's all about national promotions featuring misinterpretations of pronunciation, which then perpetuate that mispronunciation ad infinitum.

No, I don't mean NOOK-yoo-lahr vs. NOO-klee-ahr for "nuclear." President Obama has it right, and we can hope that his example will help correct the mispronunciations of previous administrations. And then there's KAR-ah-mel vs. KAHR-mel for "caramel," this seems to come under the heading of personal preference, like toh-MAY-toh vs. toh-MAH-toh. It's not worth haggling over. Nope, I mean the rampant reinterpretation of the double O.

Case in point: Wendy's restaurants feature a chirpy animated Wendy character who cheerily declares that "it's not fast fewd, it's Wendy's!" I don't go through a drive-thru for fewd, I'm looking for food, and if they can't deliver food, I'm not buyin' it.

If this becomes any more widespread, we'll be facing a linguistic crisis. The famous rhyming trio "moon / June / spoon" becomes "mewn / Jewn / spewn." which starts to sound a bit icky. And if cows stop saying "moo" and instead say "mew," what are cats and seagulls to do?

I have a feeling some of this stems from our texted communications, where "cool" has been replaced by the cooler "kewl."

Ewwwww.

Confessions of a Puppy Killer

Daisy was a winsome Australian Shepherd puppy, with chubby puppy legs and a big Aussie smile framed by soft, silky ears, bright eyes, and a shiny black nose. She was healthy, happy, and cute as the dickens. That first day, I fed her, petted her, and groomed her. Then I went about my business, doing classwork, making art, sending resumes, doing interviews, puttering about the house.
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Time passed - days, actually. My daughter emailed me that she'd dropped by to give Daisy a cuddle, and thought I should probably check on her. Yikes! Consumed by guilt, I raced to see her. She was in terrible shape by then - her status report said she was malnourished, in failing health, and - worst of all - heartbroken. Aghast, I petted her, then tried to get food, water, and health care. Tragically, I only had 10 puppy points, so could only buy water for her. There was only one option left - euthanasia. A few mouse clicks later, Daisy was a fading, furry memory.

I hope you've figured out by now that Daisy wasn't a real, physical Canine-American. She was an avatar puppy created in Pet Pupz, a FaceBook application. FB's applications include quite a few that are similar to this, but none that I've seen so far have been quite so guilt-inducing.

Since this blog is about perceptions and misperceptions (mine, since I know them better than anyone), I'm going to extrapolate from my own perception of this application and propose that the guilt built into Pet Pupz is deliberate, cynically playing on the Awwww factor conjured up by a sweet little puppy, aimed at keeping puppy parents coming back day after day to the site, generating for-profit traffic for the application owners.

To foster the initial misperception that the user is in control. Pet Pupz engineered my buy-in by having me select from an assortment of popular breeds, choose the puppy's gender, and name her. Psychologically, naming the pup establishes ownership and responsibility. Then, to fulfill my responsibility to feed and water Daisy, see to her health, and romp with her, multiple options in each of these three areas are made available.

But wait - there's a hitch! Just as in real life, food, dog toys, and veterinary care have costs. Unlike real life, only limited amounts of stroking, petting, tickling, and cuddling are available - one dose a day for free. And every day that I visit my puppy, I get 10 puppy points, which I can spend on the aforementioned food, toys, and care. But oops - 10 puppy points will buy a bowl of water, and nothing else. What's a parent to do?

PayPal to the rescue! I could buy additional puppy points, all for the joy of perceiving little Daisy in the pink of health, playful and happy as a puppy could be. And just to keep my guilt strings tuned, there was that helpful status report on her nutrition, health, and emotional well-being. Hmmm. Although I shamelessly spoil my real dog, Tucker, I draw the line at paying to care for an illusion.

There's also an insidious bit of misdirection associated with each of these FB applications. Below the top tab bar of the application, so that it appears to be part of the application, is a slug headlined (as of this writing) "You Have (5) Hate Letters. (2) people have a crush on you in Newport. (3) people hate you." To the right of this is a green button marked "Continue". How does it know I live in Newport? Because when I opted into Pet Pupz, I had to agree to allow the application to have access to my FaceBook information. Nice. Personalized insults!

But here's where that particular misperception got cleared up. Darn right I wanted to know who hates me! So I clicked on the green button, which opened a new Firefox tab. Yikes! The page was blacked out with a dire warning from my faithful browser guard, Web of Trust (WOT). "This site is dangerous!" said WOT sternly. Well, fools rush in - I had to check out the bear trap. I need to know who hates me! So I clicked "Go to site."

The entry page uses the same sort of user buy-in technique as the FaceBook app - it asks that you choose your gender, then enter your first name. The lure is that you will get to know who loves/hates you, if you just provide this necessary info. The final request - the key to that roster of lovers/haters - my cell phone number! I'm allergic to providing my phone numbers to strangers. So I cut and ran - or tried to - by closing the tab. An obnoxious popup did its best to keep me from leaving, endlessly recycling itself and refusing to close. I finally managed to get out, feeling like I needed a shower. When I checked out the comments posted on WOT, it turned out that entering a cell phone number on the site leads to monthly $9.99 billings to the phone account for "flirting tips." Evidently, it's harder to get rid of the billings than it is to get out of the website.

Aussie Shepherds don't have tails, but Daisy's tale has a couple of morals:
1. Watch what you click, or you could be stepping into a world of virtual poop.
2. Euthanizing an electronic pet is painless, unlike the real thing. All you have to lose is the guilt.