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berry patch on Peak Road
Thursday, July 30 2009
Gretchen and I ended up over at Penny and David's place near Stone Ridge early this afternoon. David wasn't there, but Penny had two adult visitors, a white lesbian couple with their two adopted daughters, both black (and thus of uncertain nationality). Sally managed to bring a Yellow Jacket hornet in on her fur, and it flew around awhile before landing on one of the little girls and stinging her. Mostly when kids are crying it's because a sister won't share a Spongebob doll, or you can't have a candy bar before dinner, but in this case it was because of a Yellow Jacket sting. In its intense immediacy, such a sting is every bit as painful as that first breakup or learning that your entire family was killed by a genocidal government bureaucracy, so I could cut her some slack when she proceeded to squall her nappy little head off. But that was just a taste of the pain of life even as a well-off citizen of the world's greatest superpower.
I went out and looked at where the Yellow Jackets might be and found them streaming out of two different holes in the hand railing of the house's long wooden ramp. Unusually for a handrail, this one was fully boxed-in by vertical clapboards on both sides of its two-by-four framework, providing multiple voids perfect for animal occupation. The problem with Yellow Jackets and other hornets is that they are almost impossible to live with. Unlike other creatures (wasps, Woodchucks, weasles, millipedes, minks, and mice), they aren't happy living and letting live. If you stray too close to the mouth of their Death-Star-shaped globular home of paper, they'll attack you like so many TIE Fighters. When I told Penny that she was going to have to poison her Yellow Jacket nests, she seemed sad. She told me about standing on the ramp and watching them fly in and out in their single-mindedly businesslike way. She'd also assumed they were bees. I dispelled her illusions, which was not something I enjoyed doing. Most of my diplomacy for the natural world centers around about how benign it is, how tree pruners and exterminators are nature-haters who exploit fears to extract money from the biologically-ignorant. But Yellow Jackets cannot be tolerated when they are within ten feet of human pathways. Eliminating them from these areas is akin to the actions the human immune system takes to keep us alive. You can think of it as sad, or you can think of it as part of the tragic struggle of life. If only forests had a similar product for dealing with humans. (Wait, they do, and Bill Gates is spending his billions trying to eliminate it. It's just another reason to hate Bill Gates and that bitch Melinda.)
After the lesbians and their nappy-headed daughters left, Gretchen, Penny and I walked up to the end of Bush Road and picked red raspberries (or some introduced Asian fruit that resembled red raspberries). There were many canes of the berries along the side of the road (41.887391N, 74.18000W), and I found a way to gradually maneuver into the heart of the prickery patch despite the fact that I was wearing flip flops and shorts. Unfortunately our dogs kept wandering out into the middle of Peak Road, and every time we'd hear a car we'd have to scream at them.
Because I wasn't eating any berries, engaging in smalltalk, or responding to incoming calls on my iPhone, I managed to far out-gather the others, something they realized when I caught up to them somewhere on Bush Road.
Later Gretchen made some sort of fabulous tart using the berries in their raw form. We brought this to the cabin being rented by Ray, Nancy, Linda, and Adam over in Saugerties, where Ray had prepared his famously-delicious vegan pasta meal (this is the one that resulted in floor pasta when he'd attempted it at our house). Also in attendance at the cabin was Ray's pottery-throwing friend Rich and Rich's inexplicably-youthful wife. At some point during dinner I brought up my theory that Brian Adam's song "Summer of '69" isn't necessarily about 1969 but is instead about a sexual act. He could have just as easily had a song called "Autumn of Rusty Trombone."
Gretchen went off with the others to see an English translation of the Greek play Antigone. I took the dogs and went home, eventually drinking far too much booze by myself. I'd been booze-free for two days, but I'd had two beers with dinner and that was all it took for me to fall off the wagon hard.
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