News From Hawkhill Acres

Those of you who are still wearing the tinfoil hats I recommended in an earlier post may want to keep them on if you’re planning to go night-skiing in the Bangor City Forest. The rest of you after-dark schussers might want to borrow your kid’s bike helmet.  As reported in the Bangor Daily News article  “Owls Attack: Warnings Posted In City Forest”, Great Horned Owls aren’t going to put up with folks invading their territory.

My question is, “What are people doing, skiing with headlamps on in the dark?” Skiing in the daytime is one thing. But after dark? And, apparently, they’re also walking, jogging, running and biking after dark also. Sheesh! When do the nocturnal animals get a break?

I’ve run into a couple of territorial owls since I moved to Maine twenty years ago. One was a Great Gray Owl that swooped down on me in broad daylight when I was walking through a pine grove near a swamp on our rural property. I never heard it coming until it was right in front of my face and if I hadn’t ducked, its talons would have scratched my eyes. I was some unsettled, I’ll tell you, and left the grove at a run.

A short time later, on the edge of that same swamp, the geek and I ran into a mother bear with cubs. They were blatting at her and she was blatting at them and Geekdaddy and I were blatting at each other to get the hell out of there. It was some exciting for a few minutes.

Another time, on that same piece of property, I walked around a large tree and came face to face with a young moose and her mother. Like most young critters, Baby Moose was very curious and approached me, which didn’t go over very well with Ma Moose, who snorted and pawed the ground. We spent a very tense five minutes with me trying to edge away so that I wouldn’t be between the baby moose and its mom, and the young moose trying to circle me so it could sniff me.I finally got away by backing slowly out of the area, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a female moose was observed by my neighbor knocking down my mailbox a couple of days later.

Many of us who live in Maine learn the hard way that civilization is pretty thin once you get beyond the city limits. Or, in the case of Bangor, even inside the city limits. When I first stumbled upon the city forest, I thought it was such a neat idea, having a forest inside a city. Now, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea at all. Cities and forests are two very different things and maybe they should be in two different places.  Or, maybe they should be closed at night, so that the wildlife can go wild for a few hours without people shining lights at them and skiing through their front yards.

One of the wonderful things about living in this hellhole lovely state of Maine is that we hardly ever get the extreme weather so prevalent in the rest of the US. Hurricanes we got, but they give us plenty of warning and by the time they’ve navigated the whole length of the Eastern seaboard they’re usually pretty pooped out. Even if they aren’t, we’ve had time to board up the windows, take in the chickens and buy every roll of toilet paper and loaf of bread on the shelves of every convenience store in the state. (Why do people do that when a storm is predicted? Do they think they’ll need more toilet paper? I don’t get the connection, myself.)

Anyhow, outside of the occasional hurricane and a blizzard or two in the winter, extreme weather leaves us alone and concentrates on the population centers of the midwest and south where it can really get itself on CNN and the Weather Channel. The only time we see Jim Cantore is when he’s standing in front of Maine on the weather map and pointing to California or New York. All of the weather mavens seem to be just tall enough to obscure Maine with their heads. Why is this?

I guess I should say that extreme weather HAS left us alone in the past, because apparently it’s just realized that we’re here and is starting to flex its muscles with a few preliminary mini-tornadoes. (We had one a while ago that tipped over a bike and damaged our neighbor’s garden shed. True, the shed was one of those cheap metal ones that shakes when you blow on your soup to cool it off, but still.) No doubt, it’ll find out that working up to a real tornado isn’t as easy in mountainous Maine as it is on the plains of Kansas, but it’s giving it a shot.

Yesterday’s Bangor Daily News reported on one such incident up in Aroostook County. I read it and knew that I had a blog post. It seems that there was a sudden windstorm, with hail, that blew in a straight line through the Happy Corner Rd community. Residents there said that the storm emerged from Baxter State Park via the north side of Mount Katahdin. Unlike most Baxter Park tourists, it didn’t just toss a beer can in the ditch as it left, but instead let loose with a barrage of hail, thunder and lightning. Then the wind picked up. Literally.

It picked up two 150 lb pigs and a 50 lb Gordon Setter. The paper doesn’t say whether the pigs survived, but the dog managed to run back to its owner, after “swimming through the air” two-and-a-half feet off the ground for 50 to 60 ft. The dog’s name is Delaney, rather than Toto, by the way.

The dog owner, Sean Kelley, says it was “a tense 15 to 20 minutes” as the storm concentrated all of its energy on the small area of Happy Corner Rd (wonder if they’ll rename it?). “Delaney got blown through the air; plus, this was true – pigs could fly,” he said. Not content with juggling next fall’s bacon and hams, the storm also destroyed gardens and reduced Kelley’s pumpkin crop to green goo.

The forecast for our area today is for thunderstorms, possibly severe. I’m in the cellar, because that’s where my office is. The dog is lying on the couch and the cats are upstairs in varying postures of laziness after being out all night dodging the coyotes we heard howling in the backyard around midnight. Two of them are suspiciously rounder than usual which leads me to think that a couple of rabbits don’t have to worry about tornadoes picking them up anymore.

We don’t have a pig to our name or any other livestock, so the only thing we have to remember to bring in before long is the deck furniture. Our garden doesn’t include pumpkins, but we do have some small tomatoes that wouldn’t survive a hailstorm, so I hope we don’t have a “Happy Corner Rd” experience. I’ll keep you posted.

Oh, and if there was anything you said you’d do “when pigs fly”, you’d better do it.

Daughter and I recently managed to combine business, pleasure and terror in a trip to our old stamping grounds in Vermont and New Hampshire. I made some money and she added yet another stuffed animal to her collection, which now rivals the nearest Hallmark store. We also took in the sights, ate a few good meals at the beaneries of Brattleboro and stayed at a motel that wasn’t too bad, once I’d cleaned the filter on the window air conditioner/heater unit and used hand sanitizer on the mold on the microfridge’s freezer door. Did I mention that this was a frugal expedition?

Well, it was. The idea was to make money, not spend it, so we resisted the urge to flee to better (and more expensive) surroundings and toughed it out for a week. However, as usual, we brought our own bedding and pillows and threw the motel bedding on the floor beside the bed. Other than those few little drawbacks, the room wasn’t bad and we enjoyed our stay.

Except for the bikers, who had evidently pooled their social security checks to rent most of the other rooms, the motel was kind of quiet. Evidently, the high price of gas is keeping people home. Who knows? Maybe in a few months, only bikers will be able to afford to go anywhere, so motels will be full of them. That would certainly change the look of the upscale places, especially if, like one biker we know, some of them insist on parking their bikes beside their beds.

But I digress. We were talking about mold, but I don’t know why. Let’s segue into the next scene where we leave Vermont and travel across New Hampshire on our way back to Maine. Let’s turn on the radio and listen to the gentle strains of classical music on NPR. Then let’s almost go off the road when that damned weather warning buzzer starts blatting and a hollow, cybernetic voice comes on and says that the National Weather Service in Nashua, New Hampshire has reported a tornado headed toward Northwoods at a speed of 35 mph.

Coincidentally, that’s the speed I would have liked to be going at least as fast as, if I hadn’t been stuck behind a pulp truck that was crawling up a hill at 20 mph and slowing down by the inch. And, even more coincidence here, folks, Northwoods was the next town on the map. Daughter is terrified of garden-variety thunderstorms, so she went into complete panic mode when she heard the warning. And I wasn’t exactly as cool as some cucumbers, let me tell you.

It got worse when we looked to our left and saw two distinct funnel-shaped inky black clouds, swirling toward us. That’s when we reached the top of the hill and the pulp truck began to pick up speed. It’s a good thing or I would have passed it in the oncoming lane to get ahead of those clouds. As we raced down the hill, Daughter reported on the clouds, which I could see in my rearview mirror. They were still to our left and falling behind us. After another five miles, they were gone, but the sky had taken on that eerie green Wicked Witch of the West glow that so often results in houses pitching, twitching and landing on ladies wearing red stripey stockings and ruby slippers. (Talk about a fashion faux pas, no?)

Well, we made it safely to Sanford, Maine and staggered out of the car and into the first motel that we saw. At that point, the Bates Motel would have been fine with us, as long as it had four walls and a roof. So we checked in and raced into our room without even grabbing our suitcases or anything else. The sky was still very dark and there had been severe storm warnings for that area also. (I was thinking maybe it was us, bringing it with us.)

It was during a lull between bouts of thunder and lightning, that I decided to go out to the car to get a few things. That’s when I met our neighbors. She was talking loudly into a cell phone and drinking from a bottle of gin. (I’ve never known anyone who actually drank gin. We always used it for linament and I didn’t know anyone could get past the smell long enough to drink it. Live and learn, I always say.) He was wearing a shirt which said, “Where the F*** is my medication” only with no asterisks. I smiled at them and he bared his teeth and growled.

It was a long night. They made several trips to their car, totally ignoring the vivid lightning, thunder and hail that kept us awake. They also watched TV until 2 and then argued loudly for a few hours. Probably still looking for his medication and I would have gladly given him some of mine if I’d brought it with me. (Linament, that is.) Finally, around 4 a.m., they both began to snore so loudly that I thought the bikers had followed us and checked in next door.

Very early in the morning, I decided to try to shower without waking Daughter, who was exhausted, poor thing. The danged bathroom light was combined with a fan, so I just opened the curtain on the small, high window which barely gave me enough light to see my way to the shower. I opened the glass shower door, grabbed some soap and a packet of “Hotello” shampoo (all vegetarian ingredients and imported from India, no less) and prepared to figure out how to operate the shower.

This is always a challenge for me and this one was even more cryptic than most. There was a lever underneath the water temperature control that said “flow control”. I had no idea what that meant, but the water was coming out in a very fine mist, almost a vapor, so I figured I’d turn the flow control up and see if I could get a little more enthusiasm out of the unit. It did seem to perk it up, but not much. It was still more mist than spray, but I stepped under it, prepared to make the best of things.

Then I immediately leapt out of the thing, almost smashing the glass door, because somehow, in spite of the fact that the spray was so mist-like, it managed to feel like tiny little needles penetrating my skin. When I turned the spray down with the flow control, it was so anemic that I couldn’t get the soap off my face. I had to stand there for what seemed like hours, just to get most of the suds off and I’m sure there were still soap bubbles in places. Then I tried opening the shampoo, but my hands were slippery and I couldn’t get enough traction with my fingers to rip the thing.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do to open a packet of shampoo in the Shower of a Thousand (Paper) Cuts, I grabbed it with my teeth and yanked. It not only opened, but opened with a rush of shampoo that went right into my mouth. All I could think of as I spit flowery-smelling stuff all over the shower was that I was so glad that it was all-vegetable.

There was barely enough shampoo left to wash my hair, but it still was impossible to rinse the stuff out due to the low flow situation. I either had to live with soap coating my hair or risk death from water pressure and I chose to live. When I went out into the room, Daughter was awake and very anxious to leave the No-Tel Motel behind us, so we lost no time in leaving.

Unfortunately, in our haste, Daughter left Henry the white stuffed elephant on the floor beside the bed and we got all the way home before we realized it. (As you may remember, Henry is married to Rose, the handkerchief doll and father to Valentine, another handkerchief doll, and they were, understandably, upset, according to Daughter who does voices for all of them, so she’d know.)

I called the motel manager, who said he’d found Henry but would have to have a money order before he could send him to us. We sent one off immediately and Daughter is anxiously watching the mailbox and hoping that Henry will be back with his family before many more nights. If he’s not, we’ll go back and get him, but it’ll be a one-day round trip, let me tell you. And it won’t be in tornado season, although who knew that Northern New England even HAD a tornado season? Except for Al Gore and that NASA scientist, of course.