A Fox Among the Squirrels

I do a great deal of work from my kitchen table, which is a lovely place to sit and watch the world go by.  In the mornings, the bay windows fill the room with light, and in winter, I watch as a parade of birds flutter about our feeder.  Assuming, of course, that the squirrels aren't taking over the joint.

Here in the wilds of the suburban wasteland, squirrels are a birder's nemesis.  They're resourceful, relentless, and astoundingly agile, and for much of this winter, they've hogged most of the seed we've set out for our avian visitors.  They do much the same during the growing season, particularly with my tomatoes, which they delight in plucking and partially devouring.  They'd found a way to the feeder, as they almost always do, and were knocking down large amounts of seed.  The birds were getting barely a taste.

Recently, though, we've had the aid of an ally in our battle against the Eastern Grey Squirrel.  Ours is an older and inner suburb, in which there are spaces between homes that nature fills with tall trees and brush.  It's a great habitat for foxes.  We've got at least one extended family of foxes who grace our neighborhood, trotting serenely down sidewalks, rustling through the woods, utterly composed and obviously intelligent.  I'd feel differently about them were I raising chickens, but I am not, and as a gardener, I consider them a welcome sight.

On its morning patrol through our yard, one of the foxes recently stopped to inspect our bird feeder, which was empty after another assault by the squirrels.  

He was a handsome and self-possessed creature, as healthy foxes are, and his keen sense of smell had alerted him to the regular presence of plump and well-fed prey.  He sniffed about.  He nosed about some more, then, after a pause, marked the bird feeder pole with a little spray of urine.  He did the same in several other places around the feeder, then ambled gracefully away with a typically vulpine insouciance.  

Huh, I thought, watching him.  Why do that?  That seems uncharacteristically dumb.  Sure, you've claimed your territory.  But now the whole area will smell of fox, a scent that prey animals know to avoid.  Why set off alarm bells?  Odd.

The squirrels did come back, because that's where the siren song of easy food summoned them.  There was real caution at first, as I watched them approach, then retreat from the feeder in alarm.  Fox!  Run!

But soon that caution vanished, because for a day there was no threat.  Just a false alarm.  No fox here.  They soon returned to gorging on the sunflower seed.

The next afternoon, my wife told me that there'd been a great ruckus at the feeder, a rush of red and grey fur, the panicked scream of a mortally imperiled rodent, followed by a wild crashing in a nearby bush, as she'd watched a squirrel barely escape with its life.

I realized then that the fox was smarter than I.  

Of course the fox knew what it was doing.  Foxes always know what they're doing.  It wasn't marking that spot for other foxes.  It was marking that spot for the squirrels.  It was carefully, purposefully getting the squirrels to let down their guard.  It was masking its scent by leaving its scent, not turning off the olfactory alarm that rings in a squirrel's sharp little brain, but leaving that alarm on just a little, until it became nothing more than background noise, nothing to worry about, this smell is totally normal.

Nature has so much to teach us, if only we'd pay attention.

Wrapped in Plastic

Monday had been my pastoral day off for many years.  Though many pastorly types take off Friday, I never quite understood that.  On Friday, the sermon still gnaws at your brain, and Sunday's busyness looms.   On Monday, you're spent from Sunday, particularly if you're an introvert and every last social synapse has overheated and is in system shutdown.

Now that I'm a part-timer, though, Mondays are often busy as I spread my sabbath through the week.  Today includes not just the ever inescapable Tribble-like piles of laundry, but also a Presbytery committee meeting, orthodontist appointments for both boys, and a drum lesson.

Once the boys were fed and watered and off to school, this morning also involved service on a recall for my aging Honda minivan, so that the airbag impeller in the steering wheel would not send shards of metal into my head when it went off.  While that might be useful in stopping zombie carjackers, it's otherwise not one of those features you want in a family vehicle.

The dealership is nine minutes and three point one miles away by car, but as the morning was free-ish and I needed the exercise, I decided to walk back.   And so I hoofed it, the bright sharpness of a February morning on my face, the half-moon still hanging in the brightening morning sky.  Whenever I walk, I'm reminded of the inhuman scale of the 'burbs, how structured they are for car and van and 'ute, but not for the creatures that actually live in them.

Part of that reminder is the near total absence of other human beings.  There are plenty of metal boxes whizzing by on the road, but almost no bipedal hominids in evidence.  My return walk...two point seven miles and forty five minutes, as I cut through neighborhoods and through a park...involved encountering exactly two other human beings.

One was an elderly Asian gentleman moving slowly along the sidewalk, slightly rough around the edges.  As I approached him, he let out a percussive belch, and my greeting only stirred a sidelong glance as he shuffled past.

The other was Plastic Man.  He's homeless, and a recurring feature in the area where I live.  I've passed him dozens of times as I've driven the roads around Falls Church and Annandale.  He wears an outfit that is wholly made of plastic bags.  Coat.  Jacket.  Hat.  Pants.  All garbage bags and duct tape.

He moved in the direction that I moved, as we both walked by the stores in a decaying, half-abandoned strip mall.  He walked slowly, uncertainly, with the self-doubting, ever-pausing drift that comes with mental illness.   Coming near, I saw how neatly the bags were taped together, and that even the pack on his back was entirely made of Hefty-sourced plastic.  It was incongruously precise, every seam sealed, evidently created with care and a peculiar sort of survival craftmanship.

I passed him walking briskly, and as I passed, I wished him a good morning.

From within the plastic, a grizzled half-shaven face showed surprise, and as I made eye contact, his struggled to focus from behind thick glasses, momentarily blinded by the bright morning sun behind me.   He made a gutteral sound, as if trying out a voice that didn't see much use and finding it wasn't working well, and then looked away.

When the time came to return to pick up the hopefully less-lethal van, I returned on my ancient, rusted, much battered and well-used mountain bike.  It was a far swifter ride back, just a tick over 10 minutes.   With the cold reddening my face, I cycled through the seedy strip mall.

Plastic Man still stood just a dozen yards from where I'd passed him.

He watched me approach, and I met his eyes, smiled, and gave him a nod.   He nodded in recognition, and smiled back as I passed.

It really is good to get out of the car now and again.

Suburban Paranoia

My life is, for better or for worse, pretty stock standard suburban.  I live in a modest rambler.  I have two kids and a dog and a minivan.  My weekday life involves a daily pattern of activities that tend to include errands and laundry...and the requisite "activities."  Monday is School of Rock.  Tuesday is Swimming.  Wednesday is Hebrew School.  Thursday is Swimming Again.  Friday we catch our breath on Shabbas. 

Though I'm a suburban denizen, there's one aspect of suburbia I try not to internalize.  It's the...well...paranoia.  Suburbia is an easily frightened place.

When I'm doing the activity-shuttle thing, I sit and listen to the parents around me, who've been thrown together at semi-random based on the schedules they've inflicted on their children and themselves.  As I listen, I hear that there are schedules out there that make mine look like a cakewalk.  Families have color coded charts that lay out the variety of different activities.  Kids leave school, and cram in their homework on the way to karate, which is followed by guitar lessons, after which they snarf down fast food on the way to tutoring.

That endless churning takes a toll on our ability to develop connections where we live...because even though we have a home, we don't really live there.  We live scurrying around in our crossovers.  For some reason, that reminds me of a scripture.  Then again, most things do. 

Earlier this week, I listened to a Mom and a Dad talking about Halloween.  They were lamenting how sad and necessary it was that their kids needed to be driven to go trick or treating at the mall this year.  "It's just so dangerous out there now," said the Mom.  "So many crazy people."  The Dad nodded.  "It's just not safe out there any more.  Not like when we were kids." So more and more kids don't go door to door with their parents.  You don't get to know your neighbors. Communities don't bond and connect, because the world is scaaaary.

This is, of course, materially false.  Statistically, crime rates are lower than they were when I was a kid back in the 1980s and 1970s.  But stressed out, over-scheduled, struggling American parents don't have the focus to realize this.  As they fret about every little minute detail of their kid's lives, they hear from their attitude of fear.  They don't know their neighbors, because they are too busy working and juggling schedules and shimmering with stress.  What little information filters in from our profit-driven media is "Fear! Terror all around! More after these messages!" 

The Big-Parking-Lot churches they attend affirm this fear, filling the world outside of their sprawling campuses with a motley cast of unbelievers and the dangerously unsaved.  Get out into the community?  Work with others?  No chance.  "Keep your kids safe in the hermetically sealed programming of our sprawling Jesus Campus!  Fear!  Terror all around!  Make sure to tithe!"

It's a strange, dark, and fearful place we find ourselves.

Fruitless

I've always walked a fair amount.  It helps keep me centered and fit and helps me at least pass for sane.  So it was a source of some dismay this spring to discover that our new puppy didn't make the best hiking companion.  Long leisurely meditative walks are hard when one arm is attached to a creature that seems intent on heading in any direction but the one you're heading in, and the other arm is attached to a bag of poo.

Now that my dog is reaching the point where she's got a tiny bit more focus, and will walk with me rather than roaring off like a squirrel-seeking missile every 15 seconds, I'm finding my Monday morning rambles through neighborhoods and nearby woods have returned.

This morning as I wandered through the bright briskness of a Virginia October, I found myself noting the absence of something.  Back when I was a kid, my parents had an apple tree in their front yard, right outside of my window.  It was quite productive, and one of the primary yard tasks I had as a teen was to collect the best of the tart green apples for the occasional pie, and to rake up the rest for composting.   It was also an amazingly friendly climbing tree, one you could scamper up easily.  In the summer of 1989, a big storm took it down.  It felt like a loss.

I make a point of mixing up my walk routes, wandering through neighborhoods in such a way that I'm always exploring somewhere new.  But though I've hit most of the nearby neighborhoods, I see pretty much no fruit-bearing trees.  There aren't apples.  There aren't pears.  There aren't cherry trees.   I don't see blackberry vines, or raspberry vines.  Virginia soil is perfect for these fruit, and yet my neighborhood seems devoid of it.

I suppose it's a bother having to clean up, or feeling obligated to make preserves and pies.  We're just too busy.  We're willing to spend endless hours mowing and trimming, or perhaps growing tomatoes or zucchini.  But fruit?  Apparently, at least in my neck of what used to be the woods, we don't have time for it.  It's just not part of our suburban desert.

So we get our apples under bright florescent light, wrapped in plastic, sprayed with pesticide, trucked in in bulk.

For some reason, the fence in my back yard suddenly looks like it might just be the ideal place for a blackberry planting or three come spring.