Dear David, How right you are. And your comments made me realize that places
are not merely geographic features but habitats that harbor life which we
can affect, either for good or evil, for preservation or destruction.

I think your comment about negativity is particularly apt now, when so
little that is truly wild and untouched remains. We humans have been
everywhere, maybe, and affected everywhere we go. I've said for years now
that I think the most compelling issue for the new century will be
environmental protection. I'm beginning to think that the most we will be
able to save will be parks, or wild places that in effect function like
parks.

What do you think? Am I too pessimistic? Sometimes I revel in the sheer
vitality of nature; but other times I get discouraged about its fragility.
Nobody valued the passenger pigeon until there was only one left. Will we
arrive at a time when the whole planet's resources are devoted toward
keeping alive the last bird of all (which, according to the sci fi writer
who posited this scenario, is a robin, not the starling that a birding sci
fi writer might have said)? - Connie

on 9/30/03 10:12 AM, David White at drmwhite at nets.com wrote:

> Connie,
>
> I enjoyed your comments this morning, as usual. I think places give to us
> more often than vice versa; and when we do give things to places, it is in
> quite different ways.
>
> The poet you mentioned seems to think that rivers are powerful enough to
> absorb and drown mere human emotions, but our negativity can and all too
> often does overwhelm nature.
>
> Trillium Corporation apparently is hoping to give its disregard for nature
> to Semiahmoo Spit; you, and Steve Taylor, and I hope quite a few others, are
> lobbying to keep this from happening.
>
> The latter is the appropriate sort of gift for us to give to places, I
> think.
>
> David
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Connie Sidles" <csidles at isomedia.com>
> To: <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 10:30 AM
> Subject: Fill refill
>
>
>> Hey tweets, I took a bad attitude with me to the Fill yesterday. I am so
> so
>> so tired of this pestilentially endless summer. When will I hear the rain
>> pattering on my roof again, or watch the little rivlets wash down my
> window,
>> creating millions of mazes that are here and then gone? When will the fall
>> really come, with its crisp mornings and its promise of vagrants around
> the
>> bend? Shoveler Pond looks like an African waterhole at the tail end of the
>> dry season, the time of year when forelorn waterbuffalo paw listlessly at
>> the dry earth, trying in vain to dig up something to drink. That was me
>> yesterday afternoon, scuffing along the dry bed and flopping down on my
> camp
>> stool by the main pond.
>>
>> I had no real excuse for my mood. In fact, I told myself that I have a
>> happier, easier life than nine-tenths of the other people on the planet,
> so
>> what right do I have to kvetch? Nonetheless the spirit of kvetch had
> filled
>> my soul. Then I heard a liquid trill that, had it been visible, would have
>> been an icicle hanging from the eaves, refracting the round and sparkling
>> world of winter. "That's certainly not anything from *these* parts," I
> said,
>> looking around for the source. There, not three feet away, were two
> juvenile
>> long-billed dowitchers, very gray in color with plain tertials. They were
>> aware of me but didn't know what to make of it, so they kept feeding until
>> they got tired. Then they put their bills in their backs and went to
> sleep.
>> Not even a merlin passing directly overhead, nor later a sharp-shinned
> hawk
>> settling into the willow tree, could rouse them. Maybe they knew something
>> about those raptors that I didn't, such as, they weren't hungry or
> hunting.
>> Or maybe the young dowitchers were too clueless to be alert. Or perhaps
> they
>> felt the raptors wouldn't attack when such a large "duck" as I was nearby.
>> In any case, the pond stayed quiet when the raptors showed up; none of
> that
>> electric energy that so often fills the atmosphere at such times.
>>
>> I relaxed too, and slowly my bad mood dissolved into the murky water at my
>> feet. I remembered a poem I had heard on NPR a few hours before. Some poet
>> was reading a poem he had written in which he asked "the river" what then
> he
>> could give to it. I hate this kind of drivel; it always sounds so pouffily
>> pretentious to me. The poet told the river he was going to give it his
>> anger, and then he was going to give it his fear too. As if, were the
> river
>> really an entity to whom one could give gifts, it would want gifts like
>> that. Good lord. Could I possibly have absorbed these stanzas, and was I
> now
>> thinking I had given my bad mood to the main pond? I couldn't be harboring
>> *poetry* in my soul, could I? I thought about a PG Wodehouse story in
> which
>> a soupily sappy romance writer died and left her cottage to her
>> mystery-writer nephew. The nephew moved in and began to write a faceless
>> fiend type of story for his editor but found that references to fairy
>> sprites and daisy chains kept creeping in and taking over his prose. The
>> story is enough to raise the hair on any self-respecting writer's neck.
>>
>> Be that as it may, I had to admit that my bad mood had fled. So I got up
> and
>> walked around my favorite place on earth to see what there was to see. I
> can
>> report that the ducks are coming back in force now. Huge rafts of coots
> and
>> ducks are floating in Union Bay and all along the lake. The sparrows are
>> also coming in now, even golden-crowned sparrows, which seem a bit early
> to
>> me. The gulls are returning, too, and the cormorants. The last of the
>> passerines are heading south: no more swallows or swifts present, and just
> a
>> few warblers left. The mallards are taking on breeding plumage, as are the
>> green-winged teals. And the flickers are going at it, too. I saw a pure
>> yellow-shafted male making a play for a hard-to-get red-shafted female.
> They
>> were easy to see, perched as they were on top of one of the lamp posts
> south
>> of CUH building. I watched them making faces and babbling at each other,
>> beak to beak, for nearly half an hour. How can you keep the cares of the
> day
>> bundled up in your heart when you have something so funny to watch? The
> Fill
>> always delivers.
>>
>> Here's everything I found:
>>
>> pied-billed grebe
>> double-crested cormorant
>> great blue heron
>> green heron
>> Canada goose
>> mallard
>> gadwall
>> green-winged teal
>> American wigeon
>> northern shoveler
>> ruddy duck
>> wood duck (males in full breeding plumage)
>> ring-necked duck
>> American coot
>> long-billed dowitcher
>> ring-billed gull
>> glaucous-winged gull
>> sharp-shinned hawk
>> merlin
>> rock dove
>> belted kingfisher
>> northern flicker (red-shafted and yellow-shafted)
>> Steller's jay
>> American crow
>> black-capped chickadee
>> Bewick's wren
>> American robin
>> European starling
>> yellow-rumped warbler
>> common yellowthroat
>> savannah sparrow
>> white-crowned sparrow
>> golden-crowned sparrow
>> song sparrow
>> red-winged blackbird
>> house finch - Connie, Seattle
>>
>> csidles at isomedia.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>