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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| From Noema, heresy and blasphemy: The Cult Of The American Lawn  Manicured grass yards are ecological dead zones. So why are they being forced on people by their neighbors and homeowner associations? Because you will conform! Or be cast out! When Janet and Jeff Crouch sought to enliven their front yard in suburban Maryland with native black-eyed Susans, Joe-Pye weed, asters and coneflowers, they had no inkling that they were doing anything controversial. Some places, that gets you the death penalty. Their endeavor eventually lured butterflies, bees, goldfinches and sometimes snakes to a thrumming oasis at the edge of Cedar Lane Park in Columbia, Maryland. Ugh! Nature! But it also stirred the anger of a neighbor who, aided by the local homeowner association (HOA), demanded the Crouches revert to the norm. People’s yards are for lawns, they insisted, and little else. "Land of the Free... Wait, not like that!" In 2017, the HOA demanded that the Crouches restore their grass lawn or risk fines or worse. By "or worse," perhaps they mean the power some HOAs have to take your house away due to unpaid fees or fines. Homeowners' Associations: Not Even Once. How did the American lawn become the site of such vicious disagreements? American culture embodies a zeal for individuality and property rights — of the idea that people should be able to conduct their own affairs in their own territory without the neighbors or the government imposing their views and forcing conformity. Like so many other cultural quarrels, the lawn has this deep contradiction at its heart. Well, at some point, "my right to always have my property values go up" became more important than "your right to do as you wish on your property." The invention of lawnmowers in the first half of the 19th century and, later, sprinklers reduced the amount of labor needed to nurture a lawn, and a new vision of park-like suburbia started to bloom... Oh, that's right, blame technology and not human nature. The growing popularity of golf, with its courses’ trimmed grass aesthetic, and the spread of car culture helped push Americans deeper into a cult of civilized lawns. I've heard that in golf course subdivisions, the most valuable houses are the ones right next to the courses. I can kind of understand why, but personally, I'd get tired of golf balls whacking against the sides and roof. Not to mention the windows. The lawn care industry began to heavily market an American sense of pride in the home and disciplined yard work as a leisure pursuit. Leave it to Americans to apply the Protestant Work Ethic to their leisure time as well. “The American lawn is a thing, and it is American, deeply American,” Paul Robbins, an expert in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the book “Lawn People,” told me. “There becomes a kind of local social pressure to make sure you’re not letting down the neighborhood — you’re keeping up the property values. Those then become morally normative.” I've never fully understood the "keeping up property values" bit. To me, a home is a home, not an investment (a second or third or whatever home can be an investment, I'll grant). Also, higher property values means higher property taxes in most states; why willingly pay higher taxes? This is America! Around 40 million acres of lawn, an area almost as large as the state of Georgia, carpets the nation. Lawn grass occupies more area than corn. And we have a metric shit-ton of corn (that's maize for you Brits) here. It’s a waste of space, Douglas Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware, told me. More biodiversity on American lawns could soak up carbon, better mitigate floods, support pollinators that propagate our food and host the insects that form the crucial early threads of the terrestrial food web. The Lawn-Order people, in general, want to keep bugs out of yards, and in general don't accept the idea of climate change and therefore the need for carbon sequestration. Of all the things that Mike and Sian Pugh loved most about the ranch-style home they bought in Loudon County, Virginia, in 2005, the meadow at the rear of the property was foremost. It's Loudoun County, not Loudon. Though that's how you pronounce it. You know, just for the record and all. But someone complained about the chickens the Pughs were raising, contravening HOA edicts, and the dispute ramped up to include the meadow itself. Seriously, if I ever move again (unlikely; I expect to croak before needing assisted living, and that's the only thing that could make me move at this point), one of my hard-and-fast rules will be "NO HOA." Resistance to the imposition of lawns has gathered steam in recent years. They are increasingly viewed as a crucible of environmental breakdown. A growing number of homeowners, alarmed by a loss of nature that imperils birds and bees, have started to question whether their lawns need to be closely cut and strafed with chemicals. We've got one house in the neighborhood where the hippie owners (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one) turned their entire front yard into a garden. I find it interesting. I have no idea what the other neighbors think of it. But I don't live in an HOA, and it's been a garden for some years now. Hartzheim identifies as a libertarian but told me she considered neat lawns a sort of civic virtue, which she acknowledged could be inconsistent with her usual suspicion of onerous regulations. "Could be inconsistent with" is a funny way to spell "fucking hypocritical." Hoogland was born in the Netherlands and has spent decades in the U.S. She lamented the American attitude to lawns — “an enigma” to her. “Americans are more afraid of pests, and there is this infatuation with cleanliness — I don’t really understand it,” she said. See, this is why we need outsider perspectives. The article is quite a bit longer than that, though I don't think it's too awfully long. But I have no mow comments for now. |
| Wait, it's July now? How did that happen? Well, whatever sorcery was involved, here's an entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]: Rococo Long ago, in my town, there was an upscale Italian restaurant named Rococo's. The exterior was nothing special; in fact, I recall it as just another corner space in just another strip mall. It was only after you went inside that you were like, "Oh, shit, I'm underdressed and I shoulda brought a date." The food, which I ate despite being underdressed and single, was delicious. Sadly, the restaurant didn't last very long (apparently the owner went baroque), but during the time it was open, it was the subject of fierce debate: Is it pronounced "roe-COE-coze" or "ROE-coe-coze?" I'm not sure if the owner ever settled the debate, or if she sat back and enjoyed the free publicity that the .gif format would later enjoy. Turns out that the architectural style, which is way more ornate than that restaurant's decor ever was, suffers from a similar ambiguity of pronunciation, as sometimes happens with English words of French origin. Yes, it was originally a French style, which only adds to the confusion about the name of a defunct Italian restaurant. For example, people in the US can't agree on whether to pronounce "route" like "root" or like "rout." Italian restaurants don't seem to last, here. The only ones that do are the basically fast-food ones that do pizza and calzones and other street food. Someone will open up an upscale one like Rococo's, it'll be booming for a year or so, and then people start flocking to the next shiny new thing. Not that there's anything wrong with pizza, mind you; it's Nature's most perfect food. It's just that, sometimes, you may want to visit a place with ceramic plates and metal utensils. And wine served in stemmed glasses, not plastic cups. I don't recall if Rococo's's wine was any good or not; it's been that long. But the story has a happy ending, or at least it's a story that hasn't ended yet (there's no such thing as a happy ending; there are only authors that stop before the end): the former owner's adult sons got together with her and opened a combination beer and wine store and restaurant, called Beer Run. Then, they opened another, larger space called Kardinal Hall, located in an old factory building that's within easy staggering distance of no fewer than four craft breweries—or, as I like to put it "a great way to spend the day." You know what we don't have here in Charlottesville, a city with significant French influence? Rococo architecture. Get that ornate shit out of here; we don't do that in central Virginia. If it ain't brick, it ain't right. I imagine rich people in their Colonial brick mansions with the white trim and double-hung windows covered with blackout shades so that any casual peeping Tom walking by don't see that they've secretly decorated the interior with gold, intricately-carved crown moulding, and Renaissance frescoes. That would amuse me. But I no longer know any rich people around here, and even when I did, I never got invited to their parties. Eh, the food couldn't have been all that great, anyway. |
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. Different country, different attitude I guess.
I took matters into my own hands (no, that's not a deliberate pun 
