cycling expeditions

Over the past few weeks I’ve been out on Pearl for three longer rides, in the range of 15-18 miles. I’m not my friend Frances, who’s been racking up hundreds of kilometers per week on her bike, Lucky. Nonetheless, after those two years when Pearl languished in the back room looking sad as her tires slowly deflated, I’m feeling pretty good about my efforts.

A few weeks ago I accompanied my friend all the way to the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, instead of branching off at Lake Artemesia as I’d been doing. The ride was good, along a clear route, with plenty of space on the streets to ride out of the stream of traffic. Except for Pearl’s chain coming off when I downshifted too suddenly—my own fault as it desperately needed to be cleaned—everything went smoothly. There are a few decent hills, and I got a workout, as this was the first ride longer than an hour that I’d been on this year. We paused briefly at Lake Artemesia, and were able to see a mother Wood Duck and her brood of ducklings paddling along through the lilies. On the way back I saw some Baltimore Orioles, as well as several Goldfinches, darting around just at the exit of the research park.

The weekend after that ride, I joined a neighbor and her friend for another two hour ride on a Sunday morning. We first went up to, and around, Lake Artemesia, where we were again lucky to catch sight of two Wood Duck mamas with ducklings. From there we did the loop I’d done last month, down the Northeast Branch to the Northwest Branch and back up to the University Hills pond. Along the Northeast Branch Trail, south of Riverdale Park, we spotted a Belted Kingfisher, a life bird for me! My neighbor has seen it (or one of its relatives) there quite regularly, so I hope to catch another look on a future ride. As we went north again on the Northwest Branch Trail, I learned that my neighbor’s friend is undertaking a river bank study that involves reestablishing native plants in the hope of aiding with flood control. I hadn’t realized that aster, which we’ve planted in our front bed, is a wildflower native to this area, so that was a nice piece of information. Later on in the ride, in the stretch near East-West Highway, we heard what my neighbor’s friend identified by ear as a Yellow-Breasted Chat. I really should take my binoculars and field guide back to that stretch of woods one morning, as we saw a Baltimore Oriole not far from where we heard the Chat.

Most recently, I played hookey from ditch digging weed pulling last Friday and enjoyed the gorgeous afternoon from atop my bike. The day before, I had (finally!) cleaned Pearl’s chain and derailleur, so I was spared the guilt-inducing grinding and scraping I’d been hearing more and more. I rode the Sligo Creek Trail from the Northwest Branch (this is the trailhead that I’ve passed a few times, so I knew how to get on it from this point) to Wayne Avenue, and then back from there. The trail itself is fine, if a little winding with all of the switchbacks over the creek which make it difficult to build up speed. Or rather, make it difficult to build up speed without fearing that I’ll steamroll a dog or small child when I come around a blind turn.

I didn’t go quite early enough in the day to avoid all the dogs and small children, nor to miss the beginning of rush hour traffic. At most street crossings I had a light, but the first two (Riggs Road and East-West Highway) were a little hairy. The path itself was relatively deserted when I headed out, but all of the after-work crowd was out two deep on the way back. I did get a cup of pink lemonade from an enterprising child and her dad in Takoma Park. I hope I didn’t scare her too much with my talk about weathering spills early in life. I meant only to extol the virtues of my trusty helmet, forgetting that words like ‘smash’ and ‘crash’ can loom large in the minds of small children.

Despite not really looking for birds, I saw a Baltimore Oriole on the Northwest Branch, in the same stretch just south of East-West Highway where we’d heard a Yellow-Breasted Chat on my previous ride. I haven’t yet seen so many orioles in my life that it’s not a thrill to catch sight of one, so that was nice. The other high point of the ride was my skill at unwrapping and eating a semi-melted Luna Bar without either getting off my bike or littering. A feat which, sadly, no one was around to appreciate.

cycling expeditions

extreme gardening

I’ve been busy lately, and hadn’t realized how much time had passed since I’ve gotten it together to write up anything I’ve been doing. The thing that’s been keeping me busy has been gardening. Although gardening is a far too genteel way of describing what we’ve been doing. Yard work is really too tame as well. In both cases, maintenance of an already-existing yard or a garden is implied. That is not what we have.

What we have is a temperate jungle. I have never had much empathy for the Europeans who came to occupy this continent, as their single-minded fixation on clearing the land and beating into into a replication of their homes seemed a little maniacal. However, as I spend hours digging out overgrowth — English ivy and kudzu and poison ivy and honeysuckle and Virginia creeper and sumac, to name a few — I am starting to feel for them. I still think their goal, to convert perfectly good forest into mediocre farmland, was out of whack with their context. But I am starting to understand how they could have gone very quickly insane, through working all day to clear one meager patch, only to turn around and see that the patch behind you had shot up another foot. That, in a nutshell, is what we’ve been doing. We like to call it ‘extreme gardening’ to try to make it more cutting edge. But really it’s just laboring away under the hot sun trying to dig out 20 years of neglect from the circumfrence of the yard.

Our main challenger in this effort has been a tenacious indigenous plant that we now know to be pokeweed. We purchased special equipment — a landscape bar — just to deal with this beast. Okay, not only to deal with this beast — we also have about a dozen stumps of various types of scrub to clear out of the yard — but it certainly came in handy. Pokeweed quickly grows to over 6 feet tall, and produces berries that birds love to eat and then poop all over the place. We didn’t get to it fast enough last year, so we have little mini pokeweeds coming up all over the lawn. Those aren’t actually the problem. The problem was — and I am happy to say that we’ve licked it — the weeds that had been establishing roots for the past two decades in the back corner of the yard. The stems and leaves die down each year, but the root mass is amazing in comparison to what’s above ground.

In the end, we had to dig down about two feet to the clay layer, and even so we left some smaller pieces of root that just refused to be dislodged. We had three roots this size to get out, and maybe a half dozen half that size. Plus innumerable little new ones from the berries. But we did it, and we now have a bare, soon to be mulched, area across the back of our yard where we previously only had crazy big weeds. Go us!

My goal is to have the invasives cleared out of the yard — side beds the length of the backyard and beds all around the house — and under mulch by the fall. We’ll be doing a little transplanting, such as moving the bulbs and the lily of the valley to more suitable and less crowded spots, but mostly this is the year of killing. Since it’s now officially summer (a belated happy solstice!) and we’ve cleared maybe a fifth of what needed to be done during the spring, I think we will be lucky to make it by the first hard frost. Granted, we started with the worst fifth, so there’s hope that the rest of it will go more quickly. And, we won’t have to do this again after this year. Or at least that’s the hope, that once we get things cleared out the whole thing will be much easier to maintain.

extreme gardening

Sabriel, Lirael, & Abhorsen, by Garth Nix

On the whole, I was disappointed in this series by Garth Nix. The first book, Sabriel, was decently engaging. I didn’t love it, but it was clever and the level of the angst of the teen protagonists was bearable. It reads as a stand-alone book, and I enjoyed it more than the latter two books. In the interest of not giving away the plot, I’ll say that it shares elements of the early Chrestomanci books, the His Dark Materials trilogy, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and Harry Potter. Of course, if I told you which elements, I’d be giving away the plot, wouldn’t I?

Lirael and Abhorsen are a single book split into two volumes (this being, perhaps, before J.K. Rowling acclimated the world to the 700 page children’s book), and as such don’t hang together as well. The plot of the latter books are also slightly more preposterous — even for fantasy — and the teenagers more filled with angst. Overall, I wish I’d stuck with Sabriel and imagined any further adventures on my own.

Sabriel, Lirael, & Abhorsen, by Garth Nix

wildlife adventures in University Park

We had no idea when we moved here that we were moving to a haven of sorts for wildlife in this area. The past few weeks have been full of wildlife, in more ways than we could have imagined. We’d heard from our neighbors that coyotes, foxes, and something which might have been a Bobcat had been seen in our town, but I found that a little hard to credit since the area is so densely populated. However, during one of our nightly walks, about a month ago, we were surprised by a Gray Fox running across the road, from one part of the park to another, a mockingbird in close pursuit.

This sighting was the beginning of a string of such events. A couple of weeks ago, we discovered a featherless baby bird on the ground in the park. The nest from which it had fallen was easily identifiable, but there were no signs of parent birds anywhere around, and there was another (dead) baby bird on the ground next to it. I decided to take it home rather than put it back in the nest, and I then spent the next few hours trying to find someone to take it. I eventually succeeded, with Gerda at Wildlife Rescue, Inc., telling us she’d be happy to wait up for us to arrive. The only problem: they’re located about an hour and a half away from DC, and we don’t own a car. Thank you, Flexcar!

By the time we were ready to go, the bird had thankfully realized it was night and gone to sleep, so I didn’t have to keep feeding it (I was feeding it bread soaked in water, which you are not supposed to do, but I didn’t have any dog or cat kibble). On the way up, we didn’t listen to the radio (it could wake up and stress out the bird) or use the air-conditioning (it could cool down and stress out the bird). For all that we were a little bit tense, the directions were easy to follow and the evening was a pleasantly mild one. We arrived to find Gerda waiting for us on the porch. We promptly delivered the bird (identified as a robin) to her, whereupon it woke up and was fed something more suitable: mush. Once the bird was settled, we were given a small tour, and enjoyed seeing the other young birds — wrens, screech owls, a cedar waxwing, and a red-shouldered hawk were the most unusual — and mammals. The little foxes were my favorite, perhaps since I had only recently seen one for the first time, but the baby possums in a pillowcase sack were cute as well.

Before we got back on the road we gave Gerda a hand bottle-feeding the fawns. This consisted mostly of us trying to hold onto the bottles while the baby deer hoovered them and trying not to flail around while the others licked the back of our knees. The experience was something akin to Gonzo eating a rubber tire to the tune of The Flight of the Bumblebee (just replace chewing with little deer licks). On our way back out of the barnyard, I managed to avoid getting head-butted in the rear by the donkey; I will only say that others of our party were not so fortunate. The final treat of the evening was seeing a Red Fox crossing the road on the way back to the highway. Before this month, only other time I’d seen a fox in the wild was over ten years ago, in Europe. We were on the Zürichberg, returning to the tram from the ice skating rink late one night, when the fox walked out onto the middle of the road, stopped and looked at us, and then continued on into the woods. It was snowing that night, and the fox looked silvery; it could have been a silver morph of a red fox, or it could have just been the snow and the light making it appear so.

After that experience, I wasn’t sure how much more wildlife excitement I could handle. Over the intervening two weeks, though, we’ve had two sightings in our yard. One was the gray fox: we heard yowling and came down to turn on the outside lights, and the fox paused by the back door and then ran off to the alley. The second was just a couple of nights ago: I heard rustling at the front of the house, turned on the outside lights, and watched a possum waddle off across the neighbor’s front yard, heading toward the park. I imagine they’re both attracted by the mulberry trees along our side border, as we’ve found fox scat at the side of the house under that tree.

I have to say, having our yard become part of the local fox’s territory has improved (and by that I mean, of course, diminished) the presence of cats in our yard. I can only hope that it’s eating the rats we saw in the autumn and spring, and not preying on our resident birds.

wildlife adventures in University Park

Kushiel’s Justice, by Jacqueline Carey

Kushiel’s Justice, by Jacqueline Carey, is the latest novel in a series that I’ve been reading for a few years now. With each new volume, the books have declined, which is a shame because the first, Kushiel’s Dart is engaging and clever and compellingly well-told. The plot, however, is quite involved, and this element is where the later books decline in quality. Rather than having the roaming and involved adventure plot of the first book set the stage for more sedate and introspective plots in the later books, each subsequent installment sends the characters to even farther reaches of the world on even more preposterous pretexts. Don’t get me wrong: Carey is an excellent writer, with an impressive ability to describe and map cultures and politics. The later books seem at times to be driven more by that ability than by a believable plot, even for a fantasy novel. This has meant that the affection I hold toward the characters determines my willingness to continue reading.

The introduction of Imriel in the third book of the initial trilogy definitely perked up the storyline. The second trilogy, of which Kushiel’s Justice is the second book, shifts to his narrative voice with less success. The character of Phèdre is so vividly drawn in the first book that it is difficult to read a first-person narrative set in that world without hearing her voice. The character of Imriel is also much more constrained by circumstance than Phèdre. As a result, his choices are more traditional, and can usually be summed up by ‘whether to conform or to resist.’ In resistance, Imriel is guilt-ridden; in conformity, he is sullen. Neither of these modes is particularly appealing in an adult. I can’t say that I would recommend the Imriel books alone; it is only because I have become invested in the fate of the main characters over the course of thousands of pages and several years of my own life that I await the next installment, promised for next year. I have hopes that the third book will rely more on political intrigue and less on haring off around the globe, and therefore be more interesting. Which is to say, ‘more like the first three.’

Despite being very invested in this series, I didn’t at all enjoy The Sundering duology, and can’t recommend it. Unless you like really derivative stuff along the lines of Guy Gavriel Kay‘s Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, in which case, go for it!

Kushiel’s Justice, by Jacqueline Carey