Month: September 2011

Crane flies invade South Beach

I was just drifting off to sleep when I felt something whoosh past my ear. Crane fly. It had been flying around the bedroom while I was reading, but I had assumed that once it got dark, it would mind its own business. Wrong. It was doing fly-bys like a drunk hummingbird.
Suddenly awake, I swatted at it, but it was gone, and I had no idea where. I turned on the light and looked around my bedspread, my walls, even inside my nightgown. No sign of my intruder. I assumed I had either maimed it or scared it enough to make it fly away.
It was late. I was sleepy. I turned off the light, and scooted down under the covers again. Fifteen minutes later, whoosh. Again, it buzzed my ear. Again, I swatted at it.
Again, I turned on the light, looked all over my room and found nothing. It’s not easy to sleep when you know something is about to buzz your head, but I dozed off anyway.
This morning, I still have not found it, but I did find three of its cousins clinging to my back door. It’s crane fly season in South Beach.
When I was a kid, we used to think these were giant mosquitoes. All it took was one to turn a classroom into a riot of shrieking children. But we didn’t see them nearly as often as we do here.
In September 1999, a year after we moved to this house, my yard was suddenly a sea of these giant mosquito look-alikes. Everywhere I stepped on my lawn, another one flew up. They clung to the walls and windows outside, and sometimes got inside. I decided it was time for some research.
That’s when I discovered these invaders were crane flies. They lay eggs in the grass, which hatch around this time of year. The bad news is that the larvae eat your lawn. The good news is that they won’t eat you. They really do look like mosquitoes, right down to what looks like a stinger hanging down, but they are not mosquitoes. They do not bite people.
Over the years, I have developed a live and let live policy with these big bugs. My lawn is no prizewinner anyway. But when they start buzzing me at night, it’s war. Look out, Mr. Crane Fly. I will find you before the lights go out tonight.

No gender confusion at the dog park

Males and females are different. That has never been more obvious to me than when I have watched Annie interact with the males at the dog park. I don’t know if I have mentioned here before that Annie is in love with a Dobie named Frisco. He’s tall, dark and perfect, a studly unneutered dog who wags his stub of a tail and comes running when he sees Annie.

Together, Frisco and Annie run and sniff each other, and Annie does this flirtatious dance I have never seen her do anywhere else. She keeps flipping her rear end at Frisco.

Enter another male, Buddy. Buddy is an Australian cattle dog mix, a bit smaller than Frisco, about Annie’s height. Suddenly the males bond and go off running while Annie tries to follow but can’t quite keep up. Occasionally, Frisco takes a break to lick her rear end. Buddy takes a minute to sniff her girl parts, too. Then he goes off running with Buddy again. Clearly females are only good for one thing in their eyes.

Another female arrives. Uh-oh, I think. Surely the girls will get jealous and fight. But no, Buddy takes a shine to the new female, and Frisco sticks with Annie. Suddenly everyone’s paired up. Isn’t this the way of the world?

What follows is an orgy of running, peeing, licking and attempted humping. Dogs don’t worry about trying to be polite. They act like animals. Watching this, it’s hard to ignore the obvious roles given to males and females in nature. I wonder how this applies to people, especially as I sit next to the male dogs’ male owners and feel as if I come from a different tribe. I’m grateful I put on makeup, and I worry about how my rear end looks as I walk away, regretting the gym pants with keys and cell phone making the pockets bulge. The men are probably too busy talking to each other to look anyway, but maybe . . .

Usually Annie lets me know when she’s ready to leave, but this time I had to drag her out. Frisco licked her ears in farewell. She staggered to the car and climbed onto the passenger seat, wet, stinking of urine, worn out and utterly in love.

You can’t argue with that.

Can Dogs Laugh? and other burning questions

I spent yesterday at the beautiful Sitka Center for Art and Ecology north of Lincoln City. What a gorgeous place, all trees, grass and wood-shingled buildings, paintings and sculptures everywhere, a stunning view of the ocean, and profound quiet. I can see why creative people apply for residencies there.

I was there with 29 other fans to attend a writing workshop taught by Brian Doyle, author and editor of Portland Magazine. If you have never read his work, please look him up and read some. It will be good for your soul. His most recent book is Mink River. As he puts it, “I committed a novel.” It’s a masterful work but a little bit tough, especially at the beginning, so you might want to start your Doyle explorations with something else.

Meanwhile . . . Doyle kept insisting that he is not a teacher and cannot teach people to write. What he did instead was help us find story starters in our own minds and experiences. We didn’t have to share what we wrote; they were for us to keep and “take for a walk” later when we went back to our computers.

One of many exercises had us asking “what if” questions. I’d like to share a few of mine and invite you to come up with your own. Let yourself be crazy. Write down whatever comes to mind.

So, can dogs laugh?

What if we all stopped wearing clothes?
If the big tree in my back yards could talk, what would it say?
What if paper was food?
What if we sang instead of talking?
What if my family all lived in one big building? Who would cook?
What if God showed up right here, right now?

It’s fun. Give it a try. You don’t have to answer these questions, but you might.

Visitors from another planet

First-time visitors from the San Francisco Bay Area don’t seem to “get” where I live. They come from a land where everything is paved and ringed with freeways, where you can find multiples of every kind of chain store and restaurant, where everything you need is within driving distance. It’s a land where nature rarely intrudes on a schedule laced with work, school, driving, and social life, always connected by computers or computer-like telephones.

They get here, and I say no, we don’t have a (fill in the blank). And yes, we get regular visits from garter snakes, deer, racoons and other critters. We don’t have sewer hookup or gas here in South Beach. We heat the house with wood or pellet stoves. Air conditioning? Open a window. Costco is a hundred-mile round trip away–and guess what, we can live without it. Yes, cell phone reception is bad. But look at that sky. Have you ever seen a sky so blue? Or a place so quiet you can hear a gentle wind? Look at the ocean sparkling to the west.

I used to drive to the old port of Alviso or up into the east foothills, desperate to get some taste of nature. It came with sewage smells, rattlesnakes and other people’s loud radios. Here, I just look out my window.

Don’t you miss California, they ask. I miss California the way it used to be, when Santa Clara Valley was not yet called Silicon Valley, and it was full of farms instead of industrial parks. My history is there. I miss my family very much. Sometimes I miss the work opportunities there. But look around. This is better.

Not everyone gets it. My sister-in-law says she’s not coming back. Some of my cousins are baffled because they don’t know any other life. But some folks understand and move here, like we did. And they stay.
*****
[I didn’t plan to plug my book, but this leads to it so nicely. Shoes Full of Sand is about our transformation into Oregonians. Available in print and ebook.]