My Position on Health Care

My wife Lori has a more reasoned essay.

I have no expectation that there will ever be a functional health care system in this country ever because we are the stupidest country in the Solar System and we are proud of it.

SallyH at Eschaton says it much better:

"If people don't think their health care is already heavily rationed, they're delusional."

Protecting Maine Atlantic Salmon

Now that Atlantic salmon in the Penobscot, Kennebec and Androscoggin Rivers have been protected as an endangered species, it is time to actually protect them. Here are some things to ponder as we do so:


1. The U.S. Endangered Species Act forbids us from giving up.

The ESA can be boiled down to the advice we give our kids: "no excuses allowed." As early as the 1830s, influential officials in Bangor and Augusta declared that the "time for salmon" was past and efforts to restore salmon to Maine's rivers were futile. The same sentiments are echoed today. The Endangered Species Act does not afford us the luxury of making a half-hearted gesture. As Yoda said, "Do or do not. There is no try."

2. The basic needs of Maine Atlantic salmon are simple to provide.

In the Penobscot River, Atlantic salmon need to swim from Penobscot Bay to Wassataquoik Stream in Baxter State Park, mate, spawn and swim back down to the sea. That is all they need.

But the Penobscot, Kennebec and Androscoggin Rivers have been blocked by dams since the 1820s. Many of these dams have been grandfathered from compliance with modern conservation laws, like an apartment built without fire escapes.

But unlike an apartment building, in our dammed up salmon rivers there is a fire every spring. Every spring, salmon cannot move past these dams. And every fall, those few salmon which do move past the dams are cut into pieces by their metal-bladed turbines as they try to migrate to the ocean.

The technology to allow salmon to move past dams and divert them from turbine blades is well known and used at dams all across the globe. All that needs to be done in Maine is for this technology to be installed at all of the dams on Maine's salmon rivers. This technology is not difficult or costly to install. It is as well understood as the technology that keeps human waste out of our rivers.

For the same reason we protect bald eagle nests from disturbance, we must protect the migration routes of Atlantic salmon from disturbance. As we have seen with the bald eagle, when we do this, the eagles return. If we leave the salmon unmolested to swim up our rivers and give birth, they will return.

3. The Endangered Species Act provides Maine with vital funding.

Few people know that nearly all of the funding to restore Atlantic salmon in Maine since the 1870s has come from the federal government, not the State of Maine.

This is the same as the federal Clean Water Act, authored by Maine's own Senator Edmund Muskie. Federal dollars paid for the wastewater treatment plants that now make Maine's rivers clean enough to swim and fish in. Without this federal money, Maine towns and cities would have been hardpressed to front the initial capital to build modern wastewater facilities.

The U.S. Endangered Species Act provides exactly the same funding opportunity as the U.S. Clean Water Act. The ESA is not an unfunded mandate -- it is the opposite. Most of the river restoration activities the ESA will fund on the Penobscot, Androscoggin and Kennebec Rivers have long been on the wish list of Maine fisheries agencies, but have never been done for lack of money. These river improvements will benefit Maine people, Maine wildlife and all of Maine's native fish, not just salmon.

4. Protecting Maine's endangered species works.

Ask the bald eagle. Nearly extinct in Maine and the U.S. in the 1960s, the bald eagle are a frequent sight in Maine and have now been removed from the U.S. and Maine endangered species lists.

Ask the wild turkey. Extinct from Maine for nearly a century, wild turkey are increasing by leaps and bounds.

Ask the moose. Reduced to a few hundred animals in Maine by 1900, moose are now common.

Ask the osprey, great blue heron, bluebird, wood duck and white tailed deer. All of these animals, once rare in Maine, quickly recovered once we gave them a fighting chance to come back.

The Endangered Species Act gives us the funding and collective spine to get done what needs to get done for those who will inherit this state and its rivers from us. It is an opportunity, not a liability.

Or to put it another way, I would rather explain to a child why a salmon leaps, than explain why there are no salmon leaping.

For our children and their salmon, there can be no middle course in the matter. It is time to move forward.

Sun Spots Return to the Sun

And I thought that sun spots were made by Creationists throwing rocks at it.

Revolution in Iran

I think the Iranian experience, especially for young Iranians, is so fundamentally different from ours that it is best for us to watch, learn and try to understand. And all three of these actions requires us to remove our own self-editing cultural and ideological blinders. Americans are so used to having complex trends and events boiled down into sound bites that it has almost become impossible for us to observe and then learn from the observation.

I am learning a lot from observing what we can gather here from what is happening in Iran. Much of it is instructive and inspiring.

The Knocked Up Palin.

So the right gets offended because David Letterman made a joke about Sarah Palin's knocked up daughter getting ... knocked up.

And let me see ... the intended reference of the joke is an 18 year old woman. According to the right, if you are 18 you are an adult, in the sense that you can be sentenced to death in a gas chamber, sent to war to die or, if you are a brown skinned furriner, you can be tortured to death in a U.S. gulag in Romania. The right believes all of this stuff is okey dokey for an 18 year old.

But if Letterman makes a joke about a knocked up 18 year old getting knocked up, she's just a child.

I have little patience for all of the panty-twisting about the sociopolitical implications of David Letterman making a toss-off joke about Palin's knocked up daughter getting knocked up by Alex Rodriguez. Not from a political party that sells t-shirts which humorously support human torture and wants to nuke entire brown people civilizations into a slag of radioactive glass.

And if Palin's daughter, Bristol, wants to be spared from the slings and arrows of being called a knocked up 18 year old by a late night comic, she probably should stop appearing on every talk show this side of Uzbekistan to discuss the wondrous benefits of being a knocked up 18 year old. Selling abstinence.

The right's pained stretch to Chelsea Clinton, like everything else they mumble, fails the fact test. Chelsea Clinton never sought out any attention and wanted none. She did not go on talk shows discussing the wonders of getting knocked up. The legal test of a public figure in libel is intent -- has the person intentionally sought the public spotlight? Bristol Palin has. Chelsea Clinton did not. You are not a public figure if you were thrust unwillingly into the public spotlight. That fits Chelsea Clinton. She only became a known person because of her parents' career decisions. Public fame was not something she sought, solicited or coveted. Nor does she today. Since her mother lost the election, Bristol Palin has aggressively and deliberately sought the public spotlight. And I haven't heard anyone on the right ever take back all the horrible stuff that was said about Chelsea Clinton, so the faux outrage and alleged parallelism here is a tad disingenuous.

And the right's attempted one-to-one correspondence with Don Imus' "nappy headed hos" comment, is for similar reasons, to no avail. Imus slagged on the black members of the Rutgers womens basketball team for genetically programmed physical features which they cannot control. Letterman slagged on Bristol Palin for behavior that she freely and willingly engaged in, despite the obvious consequences. If you make a stupid decision, but then use that same stupid decision as your ticket to public prominence and fawning attention, then it's only fair game for someone like David Letterman to point out your hypocrisy for the sake of a cheap laugh.

Don't bring a raisin to a pie fight.

Which seems a good time to revisit the words of my recently deceased artistic collaborator, Mark Kemezys:

Polygala paucifolia

If Polygala paucifolia, the Fringed Milkwort, or Gaywing, was more than two inches tall and did not live only beneath certain giant white pine trees, it would be a very well known and popular garden flower.

Polygala is one of the most difficult wildflowers to photograph. They are hard to find and hard to see. The entire plant is barely two inches tall, with flowers about the size of a thumbnail. Except for the flower, there is almost no plant, which is why its species name is paucifolia, a paucity of foliage. Their tiny size, leaf shape and preferred growing spot at the base of large white pine trees gives them their informal name, "flowering wintergreen," although they are not related to the wintergreen.



What makes Polygala such an unusual deep woodland wildflower is the electric magenta color and comical but beautifully complex orchid-like form of their flowers. They are not related to orchids either. Most woodland wildflowers are muted and pale in color. But not Polygala paucifolia. Their flowers are an almost undescribable shade of purplish magenta.

This color is so odd and bright that most cameras cannot capture it. Do a Google Image search of Polygala paucifolia and nearly all the photos will show a bluish purple flower, much like a common violet, and nothing like the color of the actual plant. This is an artifact of the camera being fooled by the deep, selectively filtered sunlight coming down from the forest canopy to where Polygona lives. And voodoo.

Getting the photos above took me three days. Not because the plants were moving so fast, but because my camera (an Olympus C-750 digital) stubbornly refused to accurately capture the real color of the flowers. This was my first attempt on Saturday, May 23:

An okay close-up photo, except the color is totally wrong. Polygala is magenta, not bluish purple. All the photos I took on May 23 were like this. The camera seemed completely incapable of capturing the actual color of the flower. It's almost like I took a picture of a sunflower and it came out maroon. I was flummoxed.

So I did some research on the camera and learned about the magical concept called white balance. My camera is automatically set to "daylight," meaning that it calibrates white (and hence all colors) to what the human eye perceives as white in normal daylight. But then I remembered that in the woods, nearly all of the available light is filtered through a thick canopy of leaves. The only light that reaches the forest floor has already had removed from it all of the frequencies of light that the tree leaves above use to make food. In essence, the light that you see deep in the woods is far different from what you would see in a field, where nothing interrupts the sunlight as it travels from the Sun to your eyes.

So I discovered that my camera has a special function which lets you set the white balance within the exact light you are photographing in. You go to that function in the camera, take out a white piece of paper, hold it right in front of the camera and lock in on that and press the button. This re-calibrates "white" as the way white looks like in the actual light you are using.

So on Sunday, May 24, I shot all of the Polygala again, confident I had the problem licked.

Nope. Even using the approved white balance adjustment method, the flowers were still too purple from what my eye told me they were. Now I was really flummoxed. How can the color of this tiny flower be so elusive to a massively high tech camera using all of the latest, better than human eye circuitry?

As a last resort, I discovered a manual white balance setting on the camera, which lets you adjust the white balance from "more blue" to "more red" by just clicking a secret button. Since the flowers were coming out way too purple, ie. with way too more blue in the magenta than red, I notched the white balance two clicks into red. Even then, the flowers were still too bluish, and worse, the pine needles and foliage were now too yellowish and reddish.

So finally, I took the last set of photos, made on May 25 (Day 3 !!!) with manual white balance set two clicks into red, brought them into Photoshop and used the "Hue/Saturation" setting to manually tweak the Magenta setting about 15 points into red and away from Blue. Then I tweaked the yellow setting to get riid of the "sickly yellow" feel that is still present at the top photo of the set.

Then, and only then, did the color of the Polygala flowers start to look like they actually look when you see them with your eyes. And looking at them now, they are still not exactly right.

There is a lesson here. Never trust your camera. Your eyes do not lie. Your camera often does. Trust your eyes.

Starflower -- Trientalis borealis

The starflower (Trientalis borealis) is a tiny woodland wildflower found in Maine and northern forests. It flowers here in Augusta, Maine in mid May, just as the giant trees above it put out their leaves and put the forest floor in shade. It blooms at the same time as Jack in the Pulpits and after the wood anenomes, trilliums and trout lilies have gone by.

The flower of the starflower is about the size of your index fingernail. The flower stem is thinner than a paper clip. The flower and stem wave an inch or two over the flattened star of leaves like a kite string and its tiny white kite. Even the slightest breath of air in the woods set them to waving. Bees are too big to land on them. Instead, starflowers are pollinated by tiny woodland ants and wasps and midges. To them, a 3 inch high starflower is like an apple tree. And all of this happens below an 80 foot high red oak or white pine or ash tree.

To really see the starflower you have to lie down on the forest floor, put your chin in the leaves, and look at it as you would a small but brilliant gemstone, or the smooth and polished rock a child proudly brings you from the surf line at the beach.

Like so much in life, seeing and appreciating the starflower depends on adjusting your height, and from that, your perspective.

Hockomock Swamp, South Easton, Massachusetts. What it is like to die there.

Punch a person from Easton in the face and the blood that drips from their nose will have been drunk at least once by a mosquito from the Hockomock Swamp.

On September 3, 2003 I got up at dawn and drove down Washington Street four miles from Unionville to the Easton/Raynham line and crawled through an endless thicket of clethra and red maple to the old cinder railroad bed the MBTA wants to use to wreck the heart of the Hockomock. On this hot and sunny September day, the Hockomock was so dry that the hummocks of sphagnum around the highbush blueberry roots were like fluffy hotel pillows. You could sleep on them.

I thought about what Jack and Anne Marie Kent said to us swamp stomping little kooks at Wheaton Farm Day Camp in 1972 about the Easton legend of the Wampanoags using sphagnum moss as diapers.

After an hour of crawling, I reached the old railroad bed and then an open glade to a well-made and new deer stand in a big hemlock tree on a small island in the swamp, almost to the Easton Rotten Gum Club and then I turned back, chased by one septillion mosquitoes as the sun got to noon.

There are no paths in the Hockomock's heart. Even the deer get lost. What trails exist on the edges peter out as the higher ground sags into the swamp proper. It is automatic you will get lost, especially on a cloudy day when you cannot use the sun for direction. Due to the high ilmenite content of the glaciomarine clay that underlies the deepest parts of the swamp, GPS units give unreliable directional readings.

Getting lost in the Hock can kill you. There are no directions, no maps, no signs, no bearings, no paths, no trails. The Hockomock doesn't care about you. You could be crying and crawling in circles under briars on your hands and knees and be just a few feet from a faint deer trail that leads you back to higher ground, but you will never know it. And this is in the dry season, when the Hockomock is at its most kind and gentle. When the Swamp is dank, dark and wet, which is most of the time, there are no dry spots. Imagine 6,000 acres of dark, still water and every inch alive with writhing, wriggling, squiggling larval mosquitoes. Imagine them hatching out by the thousands every second and starving for human blood. And you are the only human. And you are lost. Imagine 500 female mosquitoes landing on you every second needing your blood to make eggs, even as you slap the 500 already on you. Imagine this until you are a lump of bloody welts and your eyes are swollen shut. Imagine it is dark, you are too weak to walk and you try to bury yourself in the stinking, cement-like mud that surrounds you. Imagine the last sound you ever hear is the whine of a dozen mosquitoes inside your middle ear canal as you try to breathe.

Feasting.

What fascinates me about the Hockomock is how it cannot be defined. I went into the Hock on Sept. 3, 2003 under ideal conditions -- extremely dry weather, end of the mosquito season -- but was still chased out by a billion of the buggers. As it neared noon, I would kill 30 mosquitoes on my calf and in a few seconds another 30 would land. I had to run and could not even think of setting up the camera tripod to take footage. Just walking slowly would invite a horde of them to land on my face, arms and legs. I purposely chose the most ridiculously difficult route in: straight west from Route 138 at the Easton/Raynham line into the red maple swamp. This route requires you to crawl. But it was dry, so crawling was an option.

What I notice most, now reviewing this video footage, is how quiet it is. The Hockomock is one of the only quiet places left in eastern Massachusetts. The sounds of the Hockomock are, to me, as precious as the sights. The sounds of the mid day, late summer crickets and (what else?) unidentifiable insect sounds are the backdrop -- the blue sky -- to what it means to have grown up around and in the Hockomock. These were the sounds we heard hiding from the Easton cops as they searched with flashlights for us and our beer at any one of many dirt roads and turn-outs. The endless cricket rhythm is like a night light.

What is also striking about the Hock is that every square inch is occupied by a plant. Aside from the 37 octillion mosquitoes and deerflies landing on your head every second, entering the Hockomock is to enter a place completely occupied and ruled over by plants. Everything you see, touch, step on, trip on and over is a plant. The peat in the Hockomock is over 40 feet deep. There are no rocks. You are walking on 40 feet of plants. 12,000 years of plants. The only non-plant elements are you, the mosquitoes and the sky.

Don't Knock the Hock.

Respect it.

The Hockomock is our cradle.

The sphagnum is our pillow.

The cedars are our great great grandparents.

There is a spot in the Hockomock near the Raynham Dog Track which has a grove of Atlantic White Cedars that are close to 500 years old. They are huge. It is nearly impossible to reach them, except by crawling for a hundred yards on your knees and hands in cold Moxie-colored water and muck and being bitten by one billion mosquitos. This is probably the only reason why these mammoth cedars still exist: nobody has yet to get close enough to them to kill them.

They are truly beautiful. Each of these cedars creates its own little island and plant ecosystem in the swamp.

Next time, I will take you there.

If I get there.



UPDATE 1: I believe the large daisy-like yellow flowers in the video are Helianthus strumosus or a close relative. Given how far they are into the Hockomock I am assuming they are native. If anyone knows otherwise, please shout at info "@" dougwatts.com

UPDATE 2: Since this was filmed and written, there has been a sighting of the Bormonderlandster behind the grassed-in kennels at Raynham Dog Track. Broken branches, tree limbs and bloody scratch tickets suggest it went toward the deepest part of the Hockomock, or Ryan Iron Works, or Landy's Market, or the Great American Pub. Or all three. More details as they emerge.