And Suddenly 2011 at Our Place

The 'dome' has collapsed.  Not the Vikings Metrodome, the dome over our farm.  We are wrapped in snow after this last blizzard and the farm is a clean sheet.  Slowly Lyn and I dig our way out.  My recent surgery has not helped, but caution prevails as this healing is more to me than the scaping away of this white patena.  This is 'our place' as folks around here say and topic of my work here today.

I recall as best I can all the places I have been in these 62 years.  If having been somewhere makes it part of your 'place' I believe I have exhausted the definition.  Maybe like most biologists I should tally all the places I've been in my life; my career, my curiosities and consider those romps as my "home range".  That feels better immediately as there is a connotation or requirement, maybe, in defining "home range" that the ranger get something from such bounds to sustain himself.  I certainly have acquired sustenance in my range.  Think of my personal home range then as that which is contained within the lines connnecting,  Alaska, Minnesota, Virginia, Florida, Texas, California, Oregon, Washington, Montana and back to Alaska.  Good grief; that's not a home range, is it?  Appears to be more of a trip on the 'wayward bus'.

So, how about this home place as Place.  Much better.  I'm contented immediately when I imagine it.  Sure, I trek to Brainerd for surgery, even complete dozens of runs to White Bear Lake to assist my parents since moving to the farm.  Detroit Lakes and Fargo and runs to Bemidji seem to round out the range of travels from the home place and certainly the bulk of our sustenance is obtained within this tighter circle than that obscure home range I circled above.  And it would not be fair to say I'm a significant user of the Mississippi River Watershed just because I make occasional trips to Bemidji or White Bear Lake, but like Schoolcraft and others, I did look, walk and pee on the other side of the Divide.

A Watershed.  Make it third or fourth order if you can, but narrow it down if you want to call a place the "home place".  Lyn and I focus on the Buffalo River of the Red River of the North Watershed and it instills a confidence.  We just borrow those other nearby watersheds keeping the same 'rules' in play as we cross those minor divides between 'sheds.   I'll consider "Rules for the Watershed" in another blog sometime if you don't mind.

I can see the Carlson's Place south of us from our livingroom windows.  I am aware of them.  Danielson's, Winter's, Somdahl's Thompson's, Christensen's all are neighbors of 'our place'.  We all affect the watershed in some sorted ways, but we are a unit within the unit and thus have an awareness hopefully, that we affect our place as a community, likes ants upon and within the mound.  Being social like ants we ought to work together to make our mound, this place, functional and sustaining.  Why else be here with these folks?  Why contribute that which we have brought from afar to ensure a durable mound, a solidarity, a commitment to quality, a sense of well being?

Our neighbors will be out shoveling the snow from the collapse of our 'dome' today as we will.  It's time to dig out, to move some fresh feed to the cows, to air out the barn-coop for the chickens and the rabbits.  We have been sealed in this layer of white for two days and an urgency builds from within to stack a ga-zillion crystalline jewels out of the pathway, out from upon our slumbered hesitation to get back to work.

When the 30 MPH wind subsided and the sun came out in dropping temperatures yesterday afternoon the cows made their first move out of the shelter of the corral and windbreak.  Quietly 839 led them across the marsh to the winter feeding pasture.  A string of black beads plodding in line pushing knee-deep fresh snow.  Black on white my mind was confused by what was moving; cows or snowscape.  I watched from behind the breathe fogging my glasses as the herd moved, not to the bale ring to feed, but into the young aspen, willow, chokecherry woodlot that serves as a windbreak for winter feeding out from the corral.  There was the usual shoving and milling by those rotund black, legless bovines.  Quickly they settled more than I expected.  They had found a comfort in the sheltering woodlot, turned their backs to the sun and stood chewing their cuds as if there was nowhere else to be for a time.  I could sense the bubble of heat the sun was creating around them.  I had felt it on winter ski or snowshoe trips.  That spot where suddenly there is a calm and a warmth in the frigid air that causes a hesitation for the body to capture some micro-burst of solar heat not to be found in the shade or open this time of year.  They had defined a place for themselves if only for an hour and although I felt some need to go out and count them, kick the bale ring of snow, mill with them, I knew anything I did would be a disturbance and unwelcomed as I raised their instinctive fear levels and spoiled their pilgrimage to their heat sink.



It's a good day when I'm connected to our place like this.  It makes me want to layer myself with gear from the hallway closet, take up the shovel and get out there in it.  Do a little facelift if you will.  Make a dent, a very small and renewable invasion into the headwaters of the Buffalo River where I dwell for a moment connected to our place and everything else sensible to a transient being human.

White side up, for now.