Rural Crime Part 3: The Usual Suspects

   We fight a never-ending and ultimately unwinnable struggle against nature here, much more so, I suspect, than in Britain, which has long been tamed. “We’re the animals in the zoo, not the reverse,”  hubby once remarked, when we looked out to find the house surrounded by whitetail deer.    
   Another day, after we'd returned from a trip,  I went out onto the front porch, only to see a large American rodent, a woodchuck,  waddling around as though he owned the place. Oblivious in his wanderings, he came right up to my feet, then looked up, did a shocked double-take and waddled off as fast as his legs could carry him. Except he was so fat that it wasn't very fast. Woodchucks, at this time of year, are very fat indeed.
  There is a word around here for nuisance animals:  varmints.  And a woodchuck is your typical varmint, eating crops and plants and digging networks of sizeable holes. A whole section of our garden is an intricate cave network we've dubbed, "Woodchuck City".  A friend 's barn nearly fell down after a woodchuck burrowed under the foundations. Farmers and gardeners loathe them.  But I have to confess I have a soft spot for them. They are always either running away from something or lying squashed in the road.  And they apparently perform a useful purpose as the navvies of the animal kingdom, the holes they've dug making useful shelters for such as can't dig for themselves. They deserve a break. I might add that woodchucks are also known as groundhogs and have their moment of glory in February - on which more at a later date. 

Election Latest: Battle of the Signs

 

  Aha! So you thought this was an election free zone?  Well, you were wrong.
  As a foreigner,  I intend to report on political developments in Cattaraugus County in this election year with scrupulous neutrality.
  I can't tell you much as yet, except that the race is on. I know this because signs have started appearing in various bits of empty land around people's houses, commonly known around here as "yards".   A new, red sign at the junction at the bottom of our lane proclaims the cause of Mr Dan French. I thought at first that it would be a shoe-in for Mr French but then a rival, white  sign appeared, further down the road, supporting Mr Donald Yehl. At the moment, Mr French is still leading, with nine signs to four for Mr Yehl. And suddenly, there's a new kid on the block, Mr John Moshier. Well actually, he's the incumbent. His signs are white, with touches of blue and red and so far, there are three.  (I am confining myself, for the sake of accurate comparison, to the route from our house to the village Post Office, a round trip of some ten miles.)
   I should add that Messrs French and Yehl, not to mention Mr Moshier, are vying for the job of Highway Superintendent.  (America votes for everyone, even, famously, in some places, the town dog-catcher.)  Who would think this post would be so coveted but of course highways are a challenge around here, what with snow and ice in winter and the resultant potholes in summer. There may be all sorts of other perks to the job of which I am unaware.
  The only other signs that have appeared so far are those which read "2012 America vs Obama". These were designed by the Cattaraugus County Tea Party and sold in the hardware store. So far, I have counted seven on my route, against none for Mr Obama himself.   But it's still early days. In the interests of scupulous neutrality, I will keep you updated.

New Orleans

 Spare a thought for them and let's hope they don't get a double whammy. A friend's daughter lives down there and is putting a brave face on things - she says they've parked their car on the top floor of a multistorey car park in case of flooding.
Western New Yorkers are far away but they have big hearts. Students from our local university, St Bonaventure, have been going down every summer to help rebuild after Katrina.

The Language Barrier Part 3: Of Mums and Moms

  When I first saw the sign, "Mums for Sale, 5 dollars",  I did an alarmeddouble-take. Well, all right, just for a fleeting couple of seconds. After all, in a strange country, you're never quite sure what to expect. Thankfully, all was not as it seemed. Since the sign was outside the garden centre, my head finally got around the fact that these Mums were actually Chrysanthemums. Americans, perhaps finding the word a mite difficult, call them Mums.  I still, stubbornly, make a point of saying Chrysanthemums.
  But whatever you call them, I have mixed feelings about them. Number one, garden centres, such as there are around here, are full of them and nothing but them. Rows and rows of them. Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead.   They're OK as they go - but thousands of them could be deemed an exaggeration.   Number two, they send a chill through my veins. They are harbingers of autumn and seeing their serried ranks appear with monotonous regularity in August makes me think of nothing but the sound of snowploughs tuning up.  True, I have bought a few to brighten up the garden, the annuals having mostly succumbed to the drought-and-thunderstorm summer but I can only look at them with foreboding.

    But if Americans call Chrysanthemums Mums, why do they call Mums Moms? They don't even pronounce the word as "Mom". It's more like "Maaaaaaarm" .  Is it for the same reason that they call "Road Works" "Road Work" ? Just to be perversely different from the Brits? It's one of the small, niggling puzzles of living here and I'd be glad of an answer.

American Wonderings:The Storied Cape

                                                      

     My American adventure does sometimes include exploring other parts of the country - about which you might get a post or two. As a small tribute to Neil Armstrong, here's a column I wrote back in April this year. 

  It’s that time of year again. Sister-in-law and I have been on a road trip, driving her car from sunny Florida along with legions of other “snowbirds” heading back up north for the summer.   This time, our first stop was going to be the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy.  No, it wasn’t Disney World but a vast swathe of  empty land on the eastern coast of Florida which, to someone growing up in the latter part of the twentieth century had just about the most exciting place name on earth: Cape Canaveral. Technically,  the Cape is a small offshore headland though it’s name is popularly used for all the land around it, including the fabled Air Force Base and Kennedy Space Center.   It’s here, of course,  where the first American astronauts went up in their Mercury and Gemini rockets,  where the Apollo moon missions blasted off,  where, more recently, the space shuttles started and ended their voyages.  Now even the shuttles have had their day.  The last one was pensioned off a few weeks ago, doing a triumphant circuit of Washington riding piggyback on a plane before going into honourable retirement in a museum.

  At Cape Canaveral, what was once the future is now history.  The nostalgia fix starts in the car park, with each section named for some half-remembered astronaut.  Ours was Wally Schirra, who flew three missions including Apollo 7 in 1968.  Models of spacewalking astronauts flank the entrance, along with posters advertising “lunch with a veteran astronaut”  for 24 dollars.

  A bus took us to a viewing platform where we gazed from afar at the launch pads.  We drove past the “largest tracked vehicle in the world”, that transported shuttles and rockets at a steady one mile-per-hour crawl.  The marks of its monster tracks in the sand were as spine-chilling as dinosaur footprints.

  We saw grainy film of President John F Kennedy proclaiming, “We choose to go to the moon”.  We sat through a presentation on the launch of Apollo 8, our seats shaking with the simulated vibrations from a distant lift-off.  The presentation was in the actual control room for the Apollo missions – those rows of desks and primitive screens,  each chair draped with a white lab coat with a logo saying “IBM” or “McDonnell Douglas”, each desk littered with bulky headphones,  old-fashioned specs and the sort of big, clumsy ring binders I used for my school notes.  What once seemed so high tech is now as dated as the  first horseless carriage – or the blown-up 1960s photos of hairy hippies and the Monkees records that entertained us while we waited.  .

      Cape Canaveral isn’t defunct.  The era of space exploration still goes on in different ways.  Yet perhaps, these days,  there’s as much of a tourist market in nostalgia for the grownups  as in thrills for the kids.  It’s the nostalgia for the passing of an age – an age when  a supremely confident America took on the Soviets to get to the moon first, when humbled pioneer astronauts marvelled at the wonders of the universe  by quoting Scripture, when families sat through the night glued to their TVs, watching momentous events – the first moon landing, the rescue of Apollo 13 - which modern children probably take for granted.

   Times have changed and not just because Americans and Russians now work together in space. On our bus  they showed us stirring videos about shuttles and rockets but also about the 21^st century’s big idea - nature conservation.  Empty of houses and closed off from hikers and hunters, Cape Canaveral is one huge nature reserve.  A small alligator basked on a bank, reminding us that he and his kind had been around long before space travel and intended to be there long after.  Road signs said, “Wildlife Crossing, Give ‘em a Brake”.  Our bus driver pointed out a gopher tortoise, “Looks like a World War Two helmet with legs,” and an inlet where some endangered manatees, or sea cows,  were allegedly frolicking,  though I must have missed them.   An excited  little girl grabbed her mom’s arm, “I do hope I see one!”  Who needs the moon when you’ve got manatees.

 

 

A WNY Sailor's LIfe: Sun and a South Wind

                                                                      

   Today found us making the most of one of the last hot summer weekends, sailing our little boat on  Lake Erie. An hour and a half's drive northwards to Buffalo and the marina isn't that far by American standards, I've found. It's positively around the corner.
  The vastness of Erie - one of the Great Lakes - is like nothing I could ever have imagined in Britain. (Nor for that matter would I ever have imagined that, thanks to hubby, I'd become a sailor.) It's a sea, really, with waves and white caps - beaches too, if you want them. Here the British and Americans fought to the death in the war of 1812 - a story for another day
  We had a rare and beautiful south wind which had come bowling over land and had only just got up speed, so the waves were still low - conditions our small craft loves. So we fairly galloped along westwards on a perfect beam reach, past the woods and beach houses on the Canadian shore to starboard, behind us the Peace Bridge that connects us with Canada - and beyond that the Niagara River flowing down to the Falls.  Keep that up non-stop and we'd get to Toledo, Ohio at the other end of the lake, in a couple of days. We thought for a split second we'd even overtake the big catamaran that takes out joyriders, sponsored by the local TV station in Buffalo. Until we realised she was coming towards us. But no matter. Sailing isn't all fierce rivalry.
    Unless you're talking about powerboats.
   A boat called "Stress Knot" roared past us. (Why do boaters like these dreadful puns? We've got "Sea's the Moment" and "Aqua Maureen" among others in our marina) I yelled, "Speak for yourself!" as he sent us rocking and rolling in his wake, blissfully oblivious. Sailing etiquette here demands that sailors don't wave to powerboaters. I thought that shocking at first but I'm beginning to understand.

Western New York Idyll Part 2: A Little Scene Setting

   We live on a country lane, the sort that, in these hilly parts of Western New York, is called a “hollow”. From a wide, flat valley, it rises upwards through forests of oaks and poplars and sugar maples, then downwards again into the next valley.  It’s named after an early settler who was the first to build a house here. You can still see it on the old maps.

   The lane leads up past increasingly isolated houses , past the end of someone’s drive embellished by a joky, rustic, wooden deer statue that  wears a swimsuit or a muffler and ski hat, depending on the season, past  the “hunting camps”, cabins used in November for deer-hunting  and past a forest-fringed lake. Here, the road gets rougher. It used not to be paved at all and it’s still an adventure to go over the hill through the winter snow and the spring potholes.
 

    It’s not all paradise;  higher up are rusty trailers surrounded by old cars and junk  – rural poverty is never very far away here.   And recently they've put up "40MPH" signs. Since they paved the road, it's been discovered. Dogs can no longer lie sunbathing in the lane and get away with it.

  Our lane makes for a good workout  and I puff up it and run down, drinking in nature in all its glory.  I’ve had deer cantering across the road in front of me and chipmunks rushing about their business; the strange sounds of kissing in the bushes are their warning signals. Once, I spied a large, fat porcupine heaving himself up the bank.

 

   On some mornings, it's almost painfully beautiful.  At this time of year, when the sun starts to pierce through the early morning fog, clouds of mist roll over the lake and through it. one day, I saw a group of ducks paddling, spotlighted in a shaft of sunlight, like ballerinas mincing through dry ice.
  
   Running for the bus in London was never like this.