Decorah Eagle Cam

Since last weekend, I’ve been regularly checking into the “Decorah Eagle Cam,” a live-streaming camera in a bald eagle’s nest near Decorah, Iowa, where three eggs were laid a few weeks ago; one of them hatched last Friday, a second on Saturday, and the third is still hesitating. The site has gone viral, making newscasts and newspapers around the country and viewed online by around 150,000 at any one time. It’s incredibly fascinating, hypnotizing. The parent birds are vigilant, protective, keeping the nest neat and warm, covering the fur-ball chicks in the wind and cold, feeding them, protecting them. The other day, one of the chicks was out from under the mother, who was sitting on the second chick and egg, and the mother was ordering the nest, moving twigs into position, and the chick picked up a piece of brush in its beak, mimicking its mother, looking to her, not sure at the age of four days what to do with it.

But one of the most interesting aspects of the “Decorah Eagle Cam” is the carrion that has become a buffet at the edge of the nest. I first saw a crow and trout. Then a rabbit. Then a muskrat. Today a sucker. The kids have to eat.

Benjamin Franklin objected to the bald eagle being the symbol for the United States on the Great Seal. He preferred the turkey, which he thought was more what the eagle looked like on the seal anyway:

I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America . . .

The bald eagle, for Franklin, was a scavenger, a thief, more akin to the vulture than the hawk:

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

Franklin’s concern about the bald eagle as America’s symbol strikes me as particularly prescient in our time, as the United States has for the past at least 60 years – my lifetime – stretched itself out over the globe, pursuing and taking from others, particularly now, as we engage in three wars and have our military deployed in more than 150 countries around the world. We work to order our nest, nurture our young, feeding them, not with trout or muskrat, but with oil, the carrion taken from others with missiles and airstrikes. While the turkey feed contentedly in the stubble of cornfields.

Why I'm Not on Twitter

This is what I would tweet if I tweeted:

NYTimes.com has gone subscription, but still reading everything w/out problem. Maybe cause I’m long-timer?

Pain recently in “good” knee on morning walk. Osteoarthritus. Being (used to be “getting”) old sucks.

To Hy-Vee. Cod, soy sauce, rice vineg, ginger, scallions, cilantro, cuc. Poached cod, rice, cuc salad for dinner.

Finished lunch of cheese and crackers. Crumbs on chair and floor again.

Need to clean garden of last year’s detritus. But it can wait till tomorrow. Or Mon. Advantage, retirement.

I’m reading three books simultaneously, all nonfiction. But I find fiction . . . contrived? by definition?

Broke fingernail opening beer can. Super Glued it.

Cubs win! False hope once more. Season’s young. Plenty of room for disappointment.

Finally doing two weeks of neglected laundry. Three loads. Folding something to do while watching 5:30 news.

Forgot this afternoon’s blood pressure meds again. No auto reminder like coffee for am meds.

9pm and tired, trying to hold out until 10 so I don’t wake up in the middle of night again. Nothing on TV.

9:30pm – guess I’ll go to bed.

Opening Day

For the past I don’t know how many years, I’ve observed the start of the baseball season by watching the first televised game (which traditionally was the Cincinnati Reds game, but since ESPN has taken over the broadcast, it’s that network’s team of preference, the damn Yankees) while eating a bag of salted-in-the-shell peanuts and drinking a beer (or two or three or . . .). I’ve never been an avid baseball fan, rather a casual fan. And “casual” is the perfect word to describe why I like the game – why so many others apparently don’t like the game – the relaxed pace, determined by play and not the threat of the clock, punctuated by occasional excitement, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exasperating. You can decide how to watch a baseball game, either following intently the decisions and outcomes of each pitch or allowing the game to run as background to conversation, reading, cleaning, or driving (while listening on the radio, perhaps my favorite way of experiencing the sport). When traveling, I try to find a bar to watch whatever local team is playing, getting as near as one probably can to sampling the native culture.

So opening day 2011 is finally here. The peanut shells are on the floor. The empty beer cans are scattered about. All’s well with the world. (Though the Yankees win – damn!)

Goa Beaches

Walking along the beaches of Goa, India, one is harangued by young men (mostly; we did see at least one young woman), urging us to follow them to a beach chair with umbrella. We don’t know if they were employees of the cafes/bars that line the upper tiers of the beaches, or if they were freelancers, working off tips from drink and food orders. Probably the latter. The chairs were public, so they were apparently offering an ad hoc service. As we walked along the water’s edge (Arabian Sea), they would swoop down the sand, ardently urging us to take refuge in a beach chair in front of their respective café or bar, sometimes ardently, relentlessly, sometimes to the point of imagined homicide. And often they would be a mere 50 feet or so from each other, close enough to see and hear our refusal of the offer from their colleagues. They weren’t incessant beggars, but most often soft-sell, even charming hawkers, though they never tried to differentiate their particular venue from the next. We understood their situation in general (this was their meager living), and we even grew to find it amusing (“Congratulations! You’re the 100^th to offer us a beach chair on the last half mile of this beach!”), but it was hard to comprehend the incessant badgering. Yet as we walked back up the beach later, we noticed that there were fewer beach-chair-hawkers and more doughy tourists in the beach chairs (mostly over-aged and overweight Brits in bikinis and Speedos, requiring the adverting of eyes). So apparently the hard sell works.

First Spring Fishing Trip

My first (early) spring fishing trip to northeast Iowa looked promising. The forecast was for sun and upper 50s on Wednesday, then clouds and lower 60s Thursday, then down to upper 40s Friday morning. Most of the snow in the valleys has melted but not so much as to flood the streams. Last year’s vegetation has been tamped down by winter’s snow and early flooding a couple of weeks ago, making for easy footing along the banks. And there never is much pressure this early in the season.

My first stop was Ensign Hollow, north of Strawberry Point, a small, winding catch-and-release, artificial-only stream. For half a mile up the stream, stopping at maybe a dozen small runs and riffles, I didn’t see or feel a fish. But it’s typical this time of the year, in high water, for the fish to spend much of the day hunkered under bank hides, not feeding, so I didn’t get frustrated, just enjoyed being outside in the warmth, the quiet, the only sound of birds and running stream. And in the next-to-the-last run on the upper part of the stream, a run where I’ve had luck in the past, I did hook into a 10-inch brown trout (good sized for this stream) that I maneuvered to the lower end of the run where I would have had to slip down the bank into the water to release it if it wouldn’t have thankfully flipped the fly out of its lip before I had to.

But Ensign Hollow – and one fish – would wind up being the highlight of the trip.

I drove on up to Decorah, where I was spending the night, and since it was still mid-afternoon, decided to drive to South Pine, a tiny stream that holds the only population of native brook trout in Iowa. I’ve fished South Pine probably half a dozen times, and I don’t think I’ve once been able to find the parking area without getting lost in the maze of dirt roads in the area. This time I was lost for nearly an hour before finally recognizing where I was and where I needed to go. To get to the stream from the parking area, you need to hike down beside a corn field, then further down through a narrow valley, without a path of any kind, through trees, vines, brush, and, this time of year, snow. I remembered the trek being about half a mile, but as I cut my way through the thicket, I realized it was closer to a mile. And when I finally got to the stream, I was reminded why so few make the effort to get there.

South Pine is no more than two or three feet wide in most places, widening out to ten to twelve next to the bluffs, but too shallow and slow there to hold fish. As I walked upstream, I quickly saw that there wasn’t much fishing on the stream – the water was low, there were several bank hides that had collapsed into the water, and there were no fish visible in the clear water. I walked the quarter mile up from the fence at the east end of the stream, but was only able to put my fly into two small runs, with no fish apparent. A frustrating trek. But not as frustrating as the trek back to the car. I didn’t get lost, but I did get fouled in the snow and brush. At a certain point, I looked up the hill, along a deer run, and thought it might be best to hike up the hill, which I assumed would lead me to the cornfield that would lead to the car. But that hike would be circuitous, losing the deer run, through deep snow at times, thickets of vine, some with thorns. By the time I reached the corn field out of the woods, I was sweating and looking out over a landscape of rubble and snow and mud that I only thought led back to the car. Fortunately, it did, finally. And I drove back to Decorah, checked into the motel, and had a nice dinner in town that night, not fish.

The next morning I drove up through Waukon, north to one of my favorite streams, Waterloo, to fish the take-and-release section south of the Highway 76 bridge, near the Minnesota border. I was surprised to see a truck in the parking area, but figured the stream was long enough for two of us. I’d heard on the news in the morning that flooding was expected in the next few days, and was worried the water might already be high and muddy. It was a bit higher than usual, not too bad. But the fish didn’t seem to be anywhere in the stream. I fished from the parking area up to the bridge, not able to get down the bank to about half of the runs or pools because of my bad knee, but didn’t get even a bump, let alone a strike or see a sign of a fish. As I was fishing one of the last pools back near the parking lot, the other fisher from the truck came over and asked how I was doing. “Nothing,” I said. “That makes me feel better,” he said. “Nothing for me either.” And that made me feel somewhat better as well. It wasn’t something I was or wasn’t doing. Or at least I was or wasn’t doing the same wrong thing as this other sorry angler.

But as I waded through the stream back to the parking lot, and across the still melting snow, I stopped and just stood still, looking down the valley, at the bare gray trees etched against the snow on the hills, the soft whisper of the wind. And that seemed enough, worth it. As the old saw goes, it's called “fishing,” not “catching.”

Art For Art's Sake

One of the nice things about visiting art museums is that you might not only be able to view works of art hung on the walls or strewn on the floors, but also view works of art being created just about anywhere. At the Louvre in Paris a few years ago, I was fascinated with all the art students (or what I took to be art students) as they copied in meticulous detail the works of the masters, learning style, form, technique.

We were at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago today, having lunch at Puck’s restaurant. At a table next to us was a thirty-something woman, alone, who had finished her salad and fruit cup, still sipping her coffee. She had a small sewing kit on the table. I didn’t think much about it at first. But then I saw she was running a needle and thread through something – sewing on a button? darning a sock? Looking closer, it turned out she was lacing various colored thread through a dollar bill, though I wasn’t close enough to see if she was embroidering a pattern or wording, or if it was just a random abstract. But it had to be art. Didn’t it? Surely she was a student, honing her craft, fostering her vision? I considered going over to ask what her work was about, perhaps it was part of a series. But it struck me that I might have been under a false assumption, that she might not have been an artist at all, but rather a crazed defacer of federal currency. After a while, she packed up her sewing kit, put on her coat. For a moment, the stitched dollar remained on the table, and I thought for a moment it was meant as an elaborate tip, monetary art as gratuity – how great would that be? But she picked it up, stuck it in her pocket, and left. Leaving me in confusion. Which, come to think of it, is how I’m left with much of contemporary art.