When I was a little kid, my (much) older brother took me to the Cinema to see Help!. The girls screamed throughout the whole movie whenever the Beatles were on the screen. My brother stayed until the evening show hoping the adults wouldn’t scream so much and he could hear what was going on. He’s a left-handed bass player, too. I’m a right-handed bass owner.
Whenever I hear people mention the Beatles when talking about how popular such-and-such a cultural phenomenon is, I know what a fraud it would be to compare anything to it. I’ve never seen anything like it.
If you’re new around here, I live in a swamp. I know I’m supposed to call it a “pristine wetland,” but if you don’t mind, I’ll call it the bog-to-hell-and-gone instead. Everything comes out of that swamp all the time, sometimes to delight us, sometimes to bite me and give me a fever of 105. The swamp will kill you if you let it. It would pull my house apart in a decade if I ever stopped mowing the lawn.
The worst thing the swamp produces is the horsefly. It’s not actually only one kind of a beast; there’s a handful of types. They appear after the midges and mosquitoes, but before the poison ivy, generally. They’re the most vicious thing I can imagine. They attack like kamikazes, and get a blood meal from you with scissor mandibles. They make the end of my yard miserable for five weeks or so in the summer. Let’s kill them.
Go down the basement and bring your heir and your spare.
You need a plan. It should contain all the information you need to build the thing, plus a list of all the items you need to purchase to make it. It should be a loopy looking long-haired- equation looking thing like that.
1/2″ plumbing pipe, a clear plastic one-gallon jug with a screw lid, a funnel, a roll of 4 mil plastic, some punky wood strapping I dumped behind the shed 5 years ago.
The kids like the tinkertoy vibe of the plumbing pipe. I like the kids.
An 8″ square of MDO left over from windowboxes.
If you can’t use things for what they’re not intended for, you have no business on the Internet.
You buy a 20″ beachball at Wal-Mart, put a blessed halo around it with duct tape, leave a tab flap to pierce and hang the ball in the center with kite string. Spray paint the thing black while it’s hanging.
Horseflies are dumb. They see the ball swaying in the breeze and think it’s a spherical cow or something. When disabused of this notion, they always fly straight up. They eventually make their way through the funnel and die in the heat of the clear jug. No bait or poison is necessary. The trap is a little more than a week old and the jug has thousands of the nasty bugs in there. For Amityville spectacle, some of the beasts lay their eggs in the corpses of their brethren before perishing, and the little sluglike larvae hatch and crawl around in there too. For a while. Hence the breeding cycle is interrupted, and next summer is made better now.
What do you know. It works. The kids can play in the yard again. If I’d have known it would work, I would have made a better looking one.
“If I’d have known it would work, I would have made a better looking one” would make an excellent epitaph for my grave, now that I think about it.
[Update: Many people read this essay every day, seven years or so after I wrote it, and wonder if the trap works. Here’s a picture I took a day or two after I set it up. Not long after that, I had to empty it because the horseflies piled up to the top of the funnel]
What are we looking at here? The short answer is: what I drive by about a mile from my house, if I head away from the water.
There are a lot of defunct farms in New England. Subsistence farming was the occupation of the vast majority of citizens until quite recently. I remember seeing a statistic that at the outbreak of WW II, the majority of US citizens didn’t have indoor plumbing. That seemed odd, until you considered how many people still lived on farms.
It’s very difficult to grow food in New England. And over time, as transportation improved, the production of food became remoter to its consumers. We routinely eat food that is flown to its destination now. Amazing.
So the farms got bigger, and more efficient, and moved to where the ground didn’t “throw up a fresh crop of rocks every year,” as they used to say in New England. What are we going to do with the land?
For the most part, it’s become forest again, or houses. The houses we notice. The forest part gets overlooked. There’s a lot more forest in New England than 100 years ago. And when you walk through it, you occasionally come across the rubble foundations of the houses where flinty people whacked at the flinty soil generations ago. Their descendants are playing Playstation in a 3500 square foot ranch in a subdivision, and don’t even know where the food comes from. The supermarket, right?
It’s restful to drive past the hayfield. They tried to raise sheep there a few years back, but either the shepherd or the sheep got tired of it, apparently. That’s feed hay in the rolls there; I often see bales elsewhere for construction silt fencing too. There aren’t that many animals to feed, but there is plenty of construction and wetlands around.
The land has become valuable. The farmer who cleared it 250 years ago would have to visit his outhouse when he found out what the city slickers would pay to whack his farm up into houselots. He’d laugh in there, and then straighten his face and come out and get his millions.
I can guarantee you that there will be very heated discussions at town committee meetings and petitions circulated and laws passed and invective hurled when this property is offered for sale for houses to be built on it. The word “development” will be spat out like a curse, and the words “sprawl,” and “pristine,” and “save” and others will be bandied about. Because nobody knows what they are looking at.
That lot is as developed as any houselot. Trees were cleared, the granite boulders, worn smooth and round by glaciation, were stacked along the perimeter, and the farmer had a go. The land is already developed; just not to its full money potential, what they call in real estate “best use.”
What you’re really looking at there, and what I like, is a form of “mixed use.” And every single person screaming at the meetings about developing the land into houses wouldn’t allow mixed use anything, anywhere, in their town, ever — and so are kinda crazy. They just see a house as other people, and don’t care to see any other people, I guess. But more than any more houses, they refuse to see anything that isn’t houses anywhere near their house.
The loveliest places around here are mixed use places. You can walk down the streets, there’s a mixture of commercial, residential,retail, restaurant, government services, parks, and so forth. I take pictures of them all the time and folks write me and say: That’s lovely; “I wish I lived there instead of this nasty subdivision I’m in.” And planners are always trying to invent places like that, but they always turn out like Potemkin Villages. Not real. Because the thing they are trying to achieve isn’t allowed, and you can’t plan that which must arise spontaneously.
My neighbor builds dock platforms in a barn and in his yard. I hear him banging away over there occasionally, or the sizzle of a welder. At night, I hear the coyotes ranging through the woods; but I also hear the pumps in the not-too-distant cranberry bogs. My neighbor grows herbs for sale to restaurants and a small local clientele. We’re too spread out to comprise any sort of village, but the mixed use part is there, if imperfectly.
Someday, somemone will complain about all that stuff, and zoning laws will be enforced, and the NIMBYs will triumph; and this place, where people say 24/7 they don’t want sprawl, will have nothing but.
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