News from Birdland

Grey skies and temps that barely reach forty before noon make it easy to doubt, but spring really is on the way. Yesterday we got to witness a couple of doves having it off on a willow branch about five feet beyond our kitchen window. I watched them closely for a while but not out of prurient interest. It wasn't the actual copulation that was interesting (it lasted for seconds on the few occasions it happened), but the courtship ritual. They faced each other and pecked at each others' necks and breasts, parrying and drawing back in turns, keeping it up for a couple of minutes at a stretch. Usually they would stop and retreat for a while, then resume. A few times though, in the midst of the pecking one would grab the bill of the other and then Mr. Dove would make his move. While we see an avian tryst or two in the spring most years, none has involved such elaborate foreplay.

We were treated to another novel bird encounter this morning as we drove to church--we saw a wild turkey along the side of the road, only about a mile from home. I've seen them in this county, but never so close to town. They are known to hit feeders; I'd love to see them at ours.

Their Cheating Hearts

Somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of college undergraduates cheat, according to studies on academic dishonesty. So statistically, it's all but certain I teach some of these chiselers. Until recently though, I didn't think dishonesty--which, since as I teach writing courses would take the form of plagiarism--was a chronic problem in my classes. Maybe it wasn't but this semester I've encountered more plagiarism than I have in the past three or four years. Never mind that on day one of class I define what plagiarism is and outline the consequences it can bring--they do it anyway, and in shameless fashion.

These days, at least as far as I can tell, plagiarism usually takes the form of cutting and pasting information from websites. Sometimes students act surprised to find that this constitutes dishonesty, and in a few of these cases I think they genuinely don't know it does. In other cases, students know damn well what they're doing, but can't believe it when I catch them. It apparently doesn't occur to them that if they know how do use Google, I probably do too. The internet may have made cheating easier, but it also makes catching it easier.

I'm not sure how to explain this. The abundance of information free for the taking on the web, with the attendant blurring of intellectual property lines, likely is part of the problem. Maybe students take their cue from the seemingly endless parade of stories about cheating in the worlds of finance, government, sports, or journalism (or, for that matter, the high reaches of academia), reasoning that if the big shots do it, why shouldn't they?

I write my plagiarism policy in my syllabi, and refer student's to the university's statement on academic dishonesty. Maybe I could give the message more impact with a few lines from The Smiths:

If you must write prose and poems
the words you use should be your own,
don't plagiarize or take "on loan."
'Cause there's always someone, somewhere
with big nose who knows,
and he'll trip you up and laugh when you fall,
he'll trip you up and laugh when you fall.

Or, for this multimediated generation of undergrads, forget the syllabus. I'll just show the clip (giving due credit, of course).

Reset

This, some pundits tell us, is the Age of the Reset: The Obama administration is seeking to make a clean break with the Bush administration's arrogant, unilateralist foreign policy and its laissez-faire economic and regulatory practices (though to date that last break has been slow and messy).

A lot of individuals and businesses are in reset mode now as well, trying to recover from foreclosure, bankruptcy, layoffs, or restructuring. This includes the Shupac household.

As I reported back in January, my wife lost the job she'd held at a graphic design firm for nearly ten years. A personal referral gave her the one interview she's had to date, though no job offer came of it. Since then, no suitable job for her has been advertised on Monster, Michigan Works!, the local papers, or on sites of businesses or universities. None of her contacts in the business have turned up openings for her either. She's sent blind resumes to several local design shops, but heard nothing back.

So lately she's wondered if the time has come to investigate different kinds of opportunities. If perhaps it's time for a reset.

Over the years Kristine has voiced a wish occasionally that she could do "hands on" work of some kind, crafting things instead of images. It looks like she may set out to do that. She's applying to interior design programs at some colleges in this area. She enjoyed remodeling our kitchen recently, and is proud of her work rebuilding the porch a few years ago and constructing cabinets in our basement. (I was there too...but she was responsible for the detail work. I'm just muscle.) She's always been interested in furnishings, home layouts, colors and textures. She has a formidable spatial intelligence (which did serve her well as a graphic designer). It's a logical, even astute move for her.

Of course it's going to be a difficult one. Part time study isn't an option. Tuition is expensive, and while in school it's unlikely she'd earn even half of what she was making in her last job. Once she finishes, she may have to relocate to find a job--God knows where I'd find another one. Thing is...I think she could be a star in this business. I don't mean having a national reputation or a show on HGTV; just that she could be very, very good at it.

So I guess we'll be taking the plunge. We can only hope to land on our feet.



On a more cheerful note, I heard spring peepers for the first time yesterday. The world truly is waking up.

Listen

I appreciate the bible as much for its poetry and rhetorical craft as for any spiritual guidance. Actually, I think the bible's literary qualities are responsible for most of the impact its spiritual and and moral message has. Of course, there are lines that can be savored for their words alone, or that provoke ideas that are interesting without reference to any narrowly drawn theology.

For me, one of these is the opening of Psalm 19 which we read in church yesterday:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the firmament shows his handiwork.
One day tells its tale to another,
and one night imparts knowledge to another.
Although they have no words or language,
and their voices are not heard,
Their sound has gone out into all lands,
and their message to the ends of the world.

I'm no biblical scholar, though my hunch is the psalmist was being as metaphorical here as any modern writer would be. Nonetheless, I'm fascinated by the quasi-animistic vision in these lines. Creation may bear the imprint of a creator, though here it, even the passage of time within it(which if the physicists are right is perceptible only because of creation, of the establishment of some defined place in space)is imbued with a life, a meaning, of great significance and without any necessary connection to human beings and their concerns. To take a theological turn, one might say these verses limn a relation of the creation to God that goes beyond being a "general revelation" of divinity.

The biblical religions have been accused of contributing to environmental destruction by portraying humans at the center of creation and subordinating nonhuman nature to the needs and cultural prerogatives of people. There is truth in this charge, but it overlooks biblical passages that offer a contrary view. These are found throughout the Pslams, in Genesis 2, and in pronouncements of the prophets. (They do seem concentrated in the Hebrew bible.) Of course, adherents of these faiths have generally disregarded them too.

Would that be different, I wonder, if people, believers and unbelievers alike, could hear the language of the days and nights, and of the earth over which they spread. I wonder if we cannot simply because we forgot, or never took the trouble to learn.

Getting Back: Conclusion

I wouldn't have such a night again on that trip, but I did enjoy three more days of very good fishing. I stayed on the east branch between the campground and where the river crossed M-77, trying different access trails. The stretches of water I fished didn't differ a great deal from one another, and neither did the fishing they offered. Each day the wood and the shadows yielded up a dozen or two brook trout of assorted sizes (though no more 17"ers, or anything close), along with a scattering of browns, most of which registered about 12". There were slow periods. There were lost lures and snarled lines, frozen feet and sunburned arms. More than one snag or trailing root brought me to my knees midstream. But none of those things clouded my relishment of what for me is one of the rarest of feelings: joy.

I savored camp life--the evening fire, the stars overhead, fresh pan-fried trout. Waking to find frost on a June morning. Hearing grouse drumming in the distance when I'd never heard them before. A troop of rowdy boy scouts rolled into camp Friday and staged a talent show in the evening, but even they didn't ruin the mood.

Something began on that trip. What had a few weeks before been a tentative impulse prompted by memory had become a passion. I'd gotten back to the headlong excitement about fishing I'd had as a child. But beyond that, the pursuit of trout became caught up in the desire for a rich and variegated bundle of experiences, one that expands and contracts, gains and loses and regains pieces over the years: the lonely places, the campfires, wading into a river through morning fog, the chattering of kingfishers, mayflies bobbling along the surface of a river, drinking a beer on the tailgate while the moon rises and coyotes begin to howl. In short, my idea of the trout trip was born.

That week on the Two Hearted and the Fox first gave me the experience of fishing as a parallel life, complete in itself, which I mention in my bio on this blog. Not that I've sought to relive that moment. I'm not trying to step in the same river twice, and I know that you can't go home again. The life I entered there has evolved, gone into and out of different phases, just like the ordinary one. Thankfully, its end is not in sight.

Getting Back, Part 7

Had it rained, though, I'd have had a good excuse to venture into the bar in Seney and pamper myself with a smelt basket. Before I hit the Fox for the first time, I think I heated a couple of slices from the turkey "ham" I'd packed, a mass of turkey thigh meat compressed into an oval and injected with nitrates, corn sweeteners, and artificial flavors. I was wary of red meat in those days. The stuff didn't taste bad at the time (bear in mind I wasn't much more than a year beyond dormitory food), but I dread to think of having a bite now. It is amazing what we consumers can be convinced is healthy. Or, for that matter, is food. Then again, I spent a good deal of that week trying to convince trout to ingest shiny metal blades. That particular night I convinced quite a few.

Below the campground, the east branch of the Fox parallels M-77, with logging trails leading in from the highway at assorted points. I picked one of them at random and maneuvered the Cutlass over deep ruts and downed limbs to its dead end in a clearing among the spruces, the river just visible beyond. Once in the water I tied on a Panther Martin spinner with a yellow body and silver blade and began fishing upstream.

The river was narrow there, never much more than fifteen feet wide, and snag filled. Sweepers, mats of sunken brush, stumps, and in a few places wooden stakes that held up the remnants of trout shelters erected long ago. It was hard to see how fish in that river could need artificial shelter, though its environs might have been less wooded when the shelters went in. Things can change, drastically, as I could tell from the charred stumps pocking the woods along the river, evidence of great forest fires in the past.

Whenver and whyever the shelters were placed, they apparently served their purpose: trout had survived and thrived. Within half a dozen casts I'd caught one, a brook of about legal size. I had another less than a minute later, and for the rest of the night I never went longer than about five minutes without at least feeling a nip on the line. For a short stretch I hooked fish on about every other cast. These fish ran small, with many sublegal and most not beyond ten inches. However, on that night I would catch what remains the largest brook trout of my life.

I tossed the Panther Martin into a deep run that cut beneath the limbs of alders on the bank. It was undistinguishable from spots that had yielded seven or eight inch fish all night, but when my line stopped mid-retrieve, something obviously larger had come out to play. The fish darted back under the alder branches and I lowered the rod keep the line clear of them, walking ahead and reeling. The trout thrashed deep in the run before bolting upstream. I worked it close and it ran out again. It took longer to get the fish in a second time, but once I had I guided it easily into my net.

It measured seventeen inches. I intended to release it, but I had to hold it a while before I did. This helps revive the fish, but I did it mainly to savor the moment. To take in the fact that this had really happened.

I caught other trout after that one, but none stand out in memory. I'm not sure what my tally for the evening was. I must have landed twenty that were better than legal size, keeping just the first three. What does remain with me, what returns to me from time to time, is the wish I uttered walking back to my car in the darkness: that I would have many more nights like that one before I left the earth.

Fisher Poets

In my blogger dreams, I'm reporting live from the annual Fisher Poets Gathering:

ASTORIA, Ore. — Work, sometimes just the memory of it, is what brings the fisher poets to this faded port at the mouth of the Columbia River for a weekend each year.

They might wax about the versatility of a deck bucket or of romance in rubber boots, but they also describe a livelihood that can kill those who pursue it. And at a time when industries everywhere are in decline, this year some said that increasingly restrictive fishing laws had long ago taught them about struggle....

First held in 1998 with a few people standing on a stage in a bar, the event now fills a weekend with verse, song and storytelling across four sites. Given the economy, attendance was somewhat lower this year than in the past. Then again, populism played particularly well. Camp converged with oceangoing cred. Old salts dazzled California transplants. Even a bad day of fishing, it seems, can produce a decent rhyme. Or not.


Read the rest. There's a cool slideshow too.

I wonder if they'll ever have a festival for logorrheic trout bloggers?