Monthly Archives: November 2013

A few things

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Paper cups, plastic cups, Styrofoam cups.

Plastic water bottles, glass beer bottles.

Beer cans, soft drink cans.

Cardboard fast food containers, Styrofoam fast food containers.

Paper bags, plastic bags, empty garbage bags, full garbage bags.

Bundled yellow commercial telephone directories.

Automobile tires, wheels, bumpers, grills.

Child safety seats.

Plastic tricycles, plastic basketball hoop stands, plastic sandboxes.

Plastic storage boxes, wooden boxes.

Chairs, sofas, televisions, toilets, shower stalls.

Plates.

Half-butchered deer carcasses.

These are a few of the things I hate. I don’t hate them for what they are, I hate them for where they are.

All of these things are strewn along Fouche Gap Road on both sides of the mountain, and both sides of the road, although mostly on the downhill side. I played a game today when I walked the dogs. I tried to see whether I could find a place where I couldn’t see some kind of trash or garbage. It couldn’t really be done, not fairly anyway, even with freshly-fallen leaves covering a lot of sins. I was always within sight of some kind of trash. Maybe something big, maybe something little, like a piece of paper or a broken piece of a cooler.

And if you think that’s bad, you should see what ends up on the dead ends of Lavender Trail. Sometimes it’s construction or demolition debris, and sometimes it’s objects of a more personal nature.

I haven’t walked on any other country roads nearly as much as I have on Fouche Gap Road. I don’t know whether there is this much trash along Texas Valley Road, or whether it’s a function of the elevation of the road, like some kind of orographic trash precipitation.

I blame this at least partly on Floyd County. There is a garbage transfer station about three miles from our house just off Huffaker Road. They accept household garbage and some kinds of recyclable materials, but they don’t allow other types of trash. For that you have to drive about 14 miles across the county to the landfill, and they charge you to dump there. When I was building our house, I made lots of trips to the landfill to dump construction debris, and I made the trip to dispose of the old, falling-down greenhouse my father built behind my parents’ house. But it seems to be too much trouble for some people.

Once I was dumping our garbage at the transfer station when someone came up and tried to dump an old picnic table. The attendant told him that he had to take it to the landfill. So he left. When I went back home, the picnic table was just off the side of Fouche Gap Road.

The county ought to provide free disposal of all types of trash and garbage, including things like picnic tables and toilets, at least for private citizens. But instead they send prison crews once a year out to all the county roads to pick up the trash they didn’t allow to be dumped at transfer stations. Some more civilized communities allow all kinds of trash to be dumped at transfer stations. But not my own community. I guess that would cost money, and no one wants to pay not to have a trashy county.

It’s not all the county’s fault, of course. It’s the people who make up the county, all the people who prefer to dump their garbage near us. My opinion of human nature, at least Floyd County human nature, is not high. Are people in other parts of the country as trashy as they are here?

Persimmon tree

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About this time of year our persimmon trees always remind me of Charlie Brown’s pitiful Christmas tree.

Ripe for the picking

Ripe for the picking

Almost all the leaves are gone, but the ripe fruit hangs on, like ornaments on a bare Christmas tree.

Persimmons are a popular food source, judging by the amount of persimmon seeds in the poop I find around the mountain, but these prime specimens remain uneaten. Something seems to be chewing off the ends of branches of the two persimmon trees at the front corner of our lot. It leaves neat, conical stubs, and the separated branches end up on the ground under the trees. The branches are chewed off from ground level up into the upper reaches of the tree, 10 to 15 feet above the ground. I assume that an animal is chewing the limbs off to get better access to the fruit, but whatever is doing it doesn’t eat the persimmons, either from the tree or from the branches that end up on the ground.

Zeke seems pretty sure that some kind of animal is coming around the trees. I think he’s right. My best guess is raccoons or possums, but so far I haven’t seen any evidence of either except for the chewed limbs.

Fall color on Lavender Mountain

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A few weeks ago I thought our fall color was going to be disappointing. It has turned out better than I expected, but perhaps not quite as good as in some years.

These pictures are from one morning about two weeks ago when I walked the dogs down Fouche Gap Road into Texas Valley. A morning walk down that side of the mountain puts us into shade for a lot of the way down so the color we do have is muted.

This part of the road had some nice color.

Fouche Gap Road in the shade

Fouche Gap Road in the shade

Most of the color is from our maples. The maples tend to be smaller trees scattered in the forest, except beside the road, where they can stick their heads out into the sunlight. Here is one of the brighter red maples.

Maple tree on Fouche Gap Road

Maple tree on Fouche Gap Road

The maples had not finished turning color by this weekend. Even maples right beside each other varied from nearly summertime green through yellow, orange, red and brown.

Most of the large oaks and poplars are brown or maybe slightly yellowish brown. The hickories have been mainly yellow, but their color is not bright and saturated. Here is what I think was a hickory with oaks above it. I don’t remember for sure, but this might have been a tree that I don’t recognize. Hickories have paired leaves on opposite side of the stalk, while the trees I haven’t identified have leaves that alternate. (Oddly, one Web site I went to said that hickory leaves are alternate, but I am 99 percent sure that I have specifically noticed that they are paired on the stem on the trees in our yard that I have identified as pignut hickories; they certainly produce nuts that look like hickory nuts. Could I be mistaken?) The leaves of our unknown-to-me trees are significantly larger than our pignut hickories (I am pretty sure they are pignut; I don’t remember the characteristics I used for that ID, but it took me long enough to come up with it, and I was pretty sure at the time.) Anyway, the leaves in this shot are paired, so they must be hickories according to my identification. The point I was trying to make is that they are yellow, but not bright yellow.

Hickory leaves with oaks above

Hickory leaves with oaks above

Part of our problem is that in our mixed pine and hardwood forest, a large fraction of the taller hardwoods are oaks. The other large trees are poplars (much less common, not much color) and hickories (also less common, some color but not great). From a distance the mountain looks pretty brown. Most of the color seems to be in the understory, where the maples tend to share space with the deep red dogwoods. If you look carefully here and there, our very common muscadine vines provide yellow in some trees that would otherwise be pretty dull.

Even the lowly poison ivy contributes color close to the ground.

Some small maples and pretty poison ivy

Some small maples behind with poison ivy trying to blend in

I haven’t been able to get pictures from the most beautiful places along Fouche Gap Road in late afternoons on the other side of the mountain. That’s when the sunlight streams through the understory and the leaves are illuminated from behind. They seem to glow, and it’s hard to keep my eyes on the road. Maybe that’s an image that’s best built up mentally from fleeting glimpses dominated by the brightest and most colorful leaves.

 

 

 

 

I know what dogs like

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A veterinarian at some Web site recommended that dog owners not give their pets typical commercial treats. You should give them baby carrots because they’re healthy and dogs love them. Carrots are cheap, so we thought we’d give it a try. I offered Zeke and Lucy some pretty little carrots. Zeke is polite, so he took his to his bed and spit it out. Lucy doesn’t give a hoot so she just dropped it immediately.

This came as no surprise to me. I’m not a veterinarian or a dog behavior expert, but I know what dogs love, and carrots isn’t it. What dogs love is human treats. I’ve seen the intense stare when I stand in the kitchen eating one of those giant marshmallows (Each one is a meal!). Zeke switches his gaze between me and the marshmallow. As I said, he’s polite. Lucy, on the other hand, stares single-mindedly at the marshmallow, opening and closing her jaws when I take a bite, willing the marshmallow to be in her mouth instead of mine.

Lucy can recognize the particular sound that a plastic bag of marshmallows makes when a twist-tie is being undone. It is basically impossible for me to eat an entire marshmallow when they are in the house.

Here are Zeke and Lucy working Leah over to get a bite of marshmallow.

Watch your fingers

Watch your fingers

This is a setup, of course, because I wanted to document this behavior if either one of us ends up accidentally eaten while holding a marshmallow.

It’s pretty much the same thing if I get ice cream. In either case, they come and stare. Zeke drools. Lucy has better lip control. Or maybe she’s better at conserving vital digestive fluids.

They also like peanut butter. Each one has their own appropriately-sized peanut butter bong. Lucy gets as much of the peanut butter as she can out of hers, and then when Zeke is finished, she tries to climb into his bong.

Does my head smell like peanut butter?

Does my head smell like peanut butter?

Maybe Leah and I should make our own doggie treats. I’m thinking peanut butter flavored ice cream with marshmallows.

This post was inspired in part by Pablo’s post about his two dogs’ intent stare at food.