Below are archived columns orginally published in the Winchester Star under the heading "Piece of Mind."
Monday, April 4, 2005
As a rather large, hard callused, beer drinking tractor mechanic with perpetually black fingernails, I feel outstandingly qualified to write about nature’s first delicate blooms of the new year.
My discourse concerns a family of flowers that I refer to as Microscopicus.
That may not be the proper name for this group of flowers, but with the first ascension of chlorophyll, a tractor mechanic’s life gets complicated, thus, I haven’t the time to consult the thick, dusty botanical tome that my wife handed me when I decided to write this.
About my qualifications: I walked stooped over as a child.
This was central New Jersey in the 1950s and many of the ingredients of the ethnic melting pot had yet to blend in.
I lived in a community of adjoining farms owned by Lithuanian immigrants. In general, Lithuanians aren’t all that tall and husky.
When I “shot up like a weed,” (weeds were not appreciated in this pre-herbicide era) suddenly, two heads taller than most of my neighbors my age, I felt gangly, awkward, and self-conscious. I tried to accommodate this with a stooped posture.
This caused me to look at the ground a lot. There were and continue to be many fascinating things to see there, and I seemed to possess a gift for finding them.
It wasn’t until I became friends with some boys in a nearby Norwegian community that I completed my personal evolution and walked upright among these large people.
As we grew older and I continued to resemble them more and more, it became evident that I was the result of some errant maverick gene passed down through the generations, possibly recalling a Viking raid or some other medieval hanky-panky across the Baltic Sea.
To this day, I have not lost my passion for seeking out the amazing dimensions of things little noticed, passed by and forgotten, the grass roots of our surroundings. The Microscopicus and I were on a collision course.
We now live in the hills of West Virginia along a minor tributary of the Potomac.
The little river floods now and then — sometimes catastrophically— but our home is high and dry and our losses are unusually limited to swim toys and picnic tables.
When the river floods, it also sows its banks with everything from field corn to fruit trees, neatly covering the seeds with a thin strata of topsoil from upstream.
The result is a spectacular show of wildflowers from late winter to the last blue asters of November.
The white Microscopicus are the first to appear — usually in mid-March, about the time that the wild onion is about an inch tall.
These white, four petal blooms are often mistaken for a dusting of snow on the chilly moss. The blue Microscopicus appear a few days later and may well be the first tentative blooms of the very prolific monkey flower.
There’s one more Microscopic yet to appear before the usual spring rush of violets, spring beauties, hound’s tooth violets, anise and may apples. It looks like it may miss the boat as an “almost spring” flower if it doesn’t hurry to beat the vernal equinox.
It’s 5:30 p.m., March 20, and I had hoped that the orange microscopic would have made an appearance by now, but a search of the river bank didn’t turn up any.
It’s late in the day and the blooms are closing up for the night. Even I could have missed one. These flowers are the color of orange sherbet and will certainly have bloomed by the time you read this.
While not actually microscopic, one must get down onto the cold, moist soil to appreciate these flowers and a magnifying glass can help.
Ironically, though, it’s those of us who are exceptionally tall who are best qualified to tell you where to look.
A pair of ducks are searching the area of the river bank that I just left. They probably wonder what I found so interesting.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Just about all gearheads — and many not so afflicted — have an iron pile somewhere. Typically behind a shed or in a fencerow, it’s usually a pile of steel bars, plate, angle iron and, in general, a pile of metal from which material for welding projects and repairs are extracted.
Mine is behind the garage. If you need anything from my iron pile, winter is the time to get it. I don’t feel all that comfortable digging through it in the warm weather and prefer to dumpster-dive behind G.L. Dunn’s for my summer metal needs.
A copperhead snake lives under my iron pile. He seems to be a solitary snake somehow stranded there, living on rodents, bugs, and the black raspberries that fall from the brambles.
The surrounding fields are heavily patrolled by huge black snakes, a copperhead’s natural enemy, any of whom would gladly twist him into a copperhead cruller if given the opportunity.
Some local snake “experts” claim that black snakes and copperheads mate and produce a black-pit viper.
This is really just an attempt to justify the foolish practice of killing harmless black snakes.
Since the black snake lays eggs and the copperhead bears live young, it would be difficult to describe their union without sounding like a bawdy 18th-century sailor’s song about a lady of the evening who meets a lad who is a bit light in his loafers.
They’ve also suggested that I shoot the snake, often describing firearms of unlikely huge gauge and caliber to do the job.
I would rather take my chances with a timid snake that retreats at the slightest sound or movement than to fire a gun into a pile of metal.
I do kill poisonous snakes when they present a real danger. More often, though, I’m the guy who carries a harmless milk snake to safety while men run for shovels and hoes, leaving the trembling young girls to catch the fainting old ladies. I guess that my snake advocacy career began in the Lithuanian farming community where I grew up in central New Jersey.
In the spring and fall, I would catch garter snakes who, upon feeling the warmth of my jacket pocket, would become very docile pets. Being a basically rotten kid, I once used a snake in an attempt to scare the Jehovah’s Witness lady who came to visit my mother. She wasn’t afraid of the snake but told me how Satan used a snake to deceive Eve and cause the first couple to rebel against God.
In my young mind, this seemed very unfair to the snake, even considering that politicians hadn’t been invented yet.
The old Lithuanians of the immigrant generation would kill any snake that they found. I would never disclose the whereabouts of a basking black snake or garter snake, but should I happen across a copperhead, our only poisonous snake, I would report it to an older relative.
It was easy to deduce that, to these old folks, the snake, among other things, represented the Bolsheviks, the Nazis — those who caused them to leave their ancestral farms and move to this land where the language lacked poetry, with hot, dark, smoky factories and snakes that can make you sicker than a Russian vodka hangover.
It’s not so bad having a copperhead in my iron pile.
I’ll take copperheads over the Warmacht any day of the week!
If you need anything from my iron pile, help yourself. Be careful, though. We’ve had a couple of warm days lately and ... SNAKE!! ... gotcha.
Monday, November 7, 2005
In my travels, I have met very few people who are not of the learn-from-their-mistakes-and-move-ahead school.
Those who dwell on their mistakes of the past are the Gloomy Gus types, who we tend to avoid and to humor when necessary.
Still, apart from our serious regrets that we wisely keep to ourselves, there are those nagging ones that incline a fellow like me to design a three-point hitch, PTO-driven, butt-kicking machine, fire up the old tractor, engage the PTO and publicly back up to the boot-studded wheel.
Sorry if I got a bit technical there, but some ideas can only be conveyed from the heart, and even we gearheads have hearts, technically.
An all expenses paid trip to Hollywood. It does happen. I won’t go into detail as to how it happened to my family, but there we were, waking up in a nice hotel in Santa Monica, just a short walk from the beach.
Of course, star-spotting became part of the activity. Some are hard to miss: The graceful figure of Sandra Bullock sorting her mail at the Beverly Hills post office, Goldie Hawn’s smile lighting up half a block as she cruises by in her Chevy Blazer.
I saw more stars than did the rest of my family because they were looking for them to be in character while I was looking for them to appear as regular people.
“Love your work, Mr. Jones,” I said as I passed a denim-clad figure looking like an average guy on his way to buy a part for a screen door, rather than bristling with guns and radios while ordering a platoon of cops around. “Thanks,” he replied.
“Love your work, Mr. Shore,” I exaggerated somewhat to the figure, made almost invisible by the serious and intelligent expression on his face. This was fun. Until then, the most important movie star that I’d met was Charlie McCarthy.
And so this magical week sped by: Spago’s, House of Blues, Santa Monica Pier, Catalina Island. On the morning of a day when nothing was scheduled, we were headed to the laundromat via Santa Monica Boulevard in our rented Buick, while Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” played on the radio. (Back home, whenever this song would play, I was able to say that the last time I heard it, we WERE on Santa Monica Boulevard. This became the second to the last time, the third, and so on. I think that I’m at about 16. I try not to listen to it too often.)
Later that day, we went to the farmers’ market on the Third Street Promenade.
I tried to talk tractors with some of the farmers. They all had Kubotas “and some red thing” or blue, or green. Okaaay ... I then noticed an elderly gentleman standing in a line at one of the stands, waiting to pay for the small quantity of fruit that he held.
He looked very familiar, but scour the vast black-and-white corners of my mind as I may, I still couldn’t place him.
Should I say: “Excuse me, are you somebody famous?” I more or less forgot the incident until recently when I was watching one of my all-time favorite movies and the interview with the screenwriters afterward.
And there he was, trying to get a word in edgewise with Betty Comdon. I had stood for fifteen minutes with Adolph Green and never thanked him for “Singin’ in the Rain.”
Now that’s regret.
Let the clutch out ... bump the throttle up.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
There’s snowed in and there’s Really Snowed In.
Throughout my half -century on this planet, everywhere that I’ve lived has had at least a quarter mile of private road to maintain, and being snowed in was just a fact of life.
From the long but gentle lane back to my home in the then vast Central New Jersey farmland of the 1950s to the Iowa Prairie, the only way in and out of the endless network of gravel roads was to find a huge tractor going that way and follow it while watching the road drift shut again in the rearview mirror.
Nowadays, we’re on a private road that is well maintained by a landowner’s association, but snow removal can take a day or two as the contractor makes his way through the many rural subdivisions. That’s snowed in.
We haven’t been really snowed in since we lived on the side of Georges Peak, the highest mountain in Hampshire County, W.Va.
Through some unusual circumstances, my wife, three young daughters, and I wound up living three-quarters of a mile up a steep logging trail on the side of this mountain that we referred to as The Knob. Our cabin was well off the power company’s grid. We cooked and heated with wood and used oil lamps for light. We had no running water or indoor plumbing. On the morning after a heavy snowfall, we would shovel a path to the woodshed and another to the outhouse. And that was all that we did. We had an ancient Ford truck with a homemade snow blade, but it would be pointless to open the logging road until we heard the growl of West Virginia’s equipment opening the road at the foot of the hill. This sometimes took days to happen since the road back to the base of The Knob was a section of a longer road that had been abandoned. Our only option then was to enjoy the complete isolation.
Not even the heartiest of hunters invaded our silent world.
Sounds that we never notice, the faint whirring of electric pumps and fans, the air traffic above, a truck shifting gears on a distant highway, are all absent. As we walk the high mountain trails, my wife and I, breaking a path for the children, the only sounds are the wingbeats of tiny birds and the crackling noise as they munch dogwood berries in their tiny beaks and the lonesome sound of the wind moving through the gnarled, stunted pines at the top of the mountain.
We are almost startled now and then by the raucous, rowdy cry of a woodpecker before he gets down to business tap-tapping on a tree trunk.
I took some delight in the mean-spirited trick of maneuvering my wife about until she would be standing under a snow-laden cedar tree. I would then deliver a swift kick to the tree trunk and several bushels of snow would pour down on her. She would then bide her time and return the favor. The kids' laughter was well worth being the victim.
Returning home, we packed down the snow on the slope in front of the cabin so that the children could ride their sleds. As darkness falls, we build a campfire and hang lanterns strategically along the sled trail. The view from the cabin reaches to the Allegheny Front. The absence of the twinkling lights that we normally see at night tells us that the electricity is out.
A well-maintained lantern or oil lamp, high on a mountain on a clear Winter’s night can be seen for miles.
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
During my mid-20s, I worked for Whitham Orchard, an apple and peach operation near Gore.
I often ate my lunch seated on the farm’s 1930s vintage Caterpillar bulldozer, which was kept under the roof of an open-front shed. I would relax in the old leather seat and put my feet on top of the dashboard.
One very hot day, as I gazed out from my perch aboard the Cat, I noticed the silvery glimmer of a pond amongst some willow trees, about an eighth of a mile away.
Lunch was one hour, so I had plenty of time to investigate this potential swimming hole.
I drove my 1954 Chevrolet pickup out to the pond and found that it was indeed very clear, deep, and swimmable.
Taking a quick look around, I decided, rather than wearing damp blue jeans for the afternoon, I would swim in that most time-honored attire of remote country swimming holes.
What I failed to notice was a nearby road, obscured by the lush foliage and the sparse traffic moving slowly and silently over the ruts and potholes.
I also failed to notice the contracted workers, who had taken a shorter lunch break and were already back in the treetops, pruning watersprouts, or “suckers,” from the trees and thinning apples.
I swam in this manner several more times before I caught on. Until then, I had thought the pond to be remote enough for “swimsuits optional” bathing. But now, almost 30 years later, people in the community around the orchard, my former co-workers, and even their descendants still remind me, in a lighthearted, humorous way, that it wasn’t.
Piece of Mind
The Iron Pile
by Ted Kalvitis
Piece of Mind
Thank You Adolph
By Ted Kalvitis
Piece of Mind
On the Knob
by Ted Kalvitis
For now, we’re the only light shining on these mountains. A flashing yellow light moves in the distance in the valley below. WVDOT is opening up the paved road. They pass the entrance to the road back to the mountain.
We don’t mind. They’ll be back once they’re caught up.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty to do on The Knob.
Piece of Mind
On the Farm: Swimsuits Optional
by Ted Kalvitis
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