A RAUCOUS CAUCUS

Participation in the Iowa Caucus is a civic duty that most Iowans take very seriously. There’s a strong sense of responsibility as we lead the way for the nation. People at caucuses work hard to be serious and fair in their deliberations.

When we lived in Iowa City, our precinct had a wild caucus. The school gym filled with hundreds of relentlessly educated people, but when it came time for resolutions, it was a case of­­––if I support yours, you’ll support mine. You could propose a non-discrimination resolution allowing any primate to run for public office, and it would pass unanimously. There is a tacit understanding that any idea, no matter how whacko, deserves a chance for an up and down vote. Iowa Citians believe they are world citizens as well as Iowans. They don’t resolve that the city should be a nuclear free zone; they resolved that galaxy should be a nuclear free zone. No one worries about who might enforce it.

Soon after we moved to the country, we set out for our first rural caucus. We followed the map and were directed to turn onto a road labeled Unimproved Secondary Road. It was more like a Kiss Your Axle Goodbye road. We followed the ruts and arrived right at 8 p.m The caucus was held at a farmhouse, and it was quite dark––we hoped we had the right address. We certainly didn’t have to fight for a parking spot in the farmyard. We sloshed through the mud and knocked on the side door.

The man who answered the door was still in his work clothes and supper dishes were still on the table. He’d just come in from evening chores. We followed him to the kitchen table, and an elderly women joined us. He introduced his mother.

“Here,” he said. “Haven’t had time to look at this.” He pushed a fat manila envelope toward my husband. It was full of ballots, pamphlets, reporting forms, and instructions on how to run the caucus meeting. As my husband read through the instructions, the mother got up and said, “My show’s on” and walked into the other room. Now we were three.

We filled out the paperwork, agreed on our candidates, and that left one form to be completed.

My husband turned and looked at me with a long-suffering, pleading look. “Anyone-have-any-resolutions?”

Gee, I don’t know. How about we hereby resolve to outlaw hog lots? That way, we won’t have to keep airline vomit bags in our remote control caddy in case the wind comes around from the south.  Or we could resolve to reduce pesticide run-off from fields near our wetlands. Maybe we could resolve to outlaw guns––then the lady of the house could use that rack in the pantry for spices. I opened my mouth to speak.

“Okay, then,” said my husband, “no resolutions from York Township.”

We were home by 9, plenty of time to watch other caucus results come in. Democracy had been served.



More on caucuses:
http://www.iowacaucus.org/iacaucus.html

SEX IN THE CITY COUNTRY

We have a beautiful 4-acre pond. When the weather is halfway bearable, I am in my kayak spying on and photographing pond dwellers for an embarrassing number of hours a day. I have photographed microscopic beasts that live inside the surface of the pond. Not below it, not above it. Inside it! I have snuck up on herons and been chased across the water by a muskrat. I will never feel like an expert because every visit brings some new bird, animal, or plant for my viewing pleasure. But I know enough to tell you this: that pond can best be described as Copulation Station.

Dragonflies and damselflies don’t live very long so they don’t waste any time checking things off their bucket lists. Their first five “to do” items are mate, mate, mate, mate, and mate. It’s an Odonata Orgy every summer. And they are very kinky beings––you can find threesomes, foursomes, etc.—depends on how much room to line up on the leaf.

Ducks. If you were not a feminist before, you’d shape up after watching ducks mate. After pulling the feathers on her neck, he stands on her back and forces her head under water. You get 20 ducks mating on your pond and it’s like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre if it had occurred at a water park. Splashing, screaming, flapping. 

One June afternoon I was privy to an event that made all others not just pale by comparison but completely disappear. On the western edge of our woods is a wetlands area. You have to walk through some difficult forest to get there, climbing over logs, sliding down stream banks, prying yourself loose from the greenbriers that grab your clothing. I tried so hard not to make any noise while walking through the woods, slipping my toes under the leaves, avoiding twigs, stifling sneezes until my sinuses nearly ruptured. I had placed an old wooden chair in a spot behind a huge oak in the wetland, so that I wouldn’t be spotted as I watched and photographed water birds. I wore brown and green clothing to blend in with the leaves, but to the herons and eagles, my quiet approach looked as though I’d arrived in a rainbow-striped hot air balloon while playing the bagpipes and tap dancing. They seldom stuck around. I had to sit quietly for hours until they returned to the swamp, if they returned.

That’s just what I was doing one day when I heard a mournful sound, a groan from the edge of the water maybe a hundred feet away. I couldn’t spot anything. Rising as slowly as possible, camera at the ready, I moved a few yards closer and hunkered down. Something was breathing with great effort. Loudly. Frequently. Oh, lord, I hoped it wasn’t an injured deer dying in pain. The prudent thing to do would have been to move away from, not toward, this sound. As I moved closer, I saw movement in the water right at the shoreline. 
Turns out, this was not a case where a big sound was coming from something surprisingly small. No, no. It was coming from something surprisingly huge. Maybe 15 inches across, just under the surface of the murky water. 

And then it rose up out of the water and crawled onto the shore. Just it’s two front feet––the rest stayed under water. Those two front feet had long nails. Over an inch. I moved closer because he didn’t seem to notice me crouching there.

Now he stood up, rising to a height of perhaps 9 inches. I trained my telephoto lens on him, turned the focus ring, and stifled a scream. Though this is a wild area with no human traffic other than me, I had not expected to find a prehistoric creature. I moved to within 20 feet.

This was a turtle, the biggest and ugliest turtle I’d ever seen. I grew up on a lake, so I’d seen big old snappers. This one was at least 16 inches across, but more impressively, he was massive in bulk. From carapace to plastron (upper to lower shell) he was 6 or 7 inches. Between the shells he was all muscle––there was likely 20 pounds of meat in there.
His nose had three pointed prongs. And something you never want to see––his tongue was a horrid pink snake that would have made Gene Simmons quiver with envy. 4 out of 5 of my relatives have dogs smaller than this turtle. And because I knew no one would believe what I had seen, I took picture after picture of this writhing, snorting, heaving beast. I went through 2 rolls of 36 shots each and ran out of film. I figured he’d be gone by the time I went back for more film, but I made the difficult trek home and back, running, tripping, sliding. It took about 30 minutes. And wonder of wonders, he was still there when I returned.

I assumed the position and readied my camera once more. And then he began to rise up off the earth. That’s because his mate––on top of whom he was clamped, it turns out–– was rising up from under the water, a place I’m pretty sure she was sick of being. It would seem, it did appear, I do believe that I had just shot 2-1/2 rolls of film filled entirely with snapping turtle porn. It was like a dream come true.

I didn’t initially identify what was going on in those photos when I emailed them to everyone I knew. They all commented on how ugly that turtle was, how big. When I did ask them to look more closely, my inbox went silent. 

If you look up all the definitions of horny*––having horns or hornlike projections, being tough and calloused, desirous of sexual activity––I think you will agree that that guy owns them all.

* From the Free Online Dictionary

More on giant snappers:


http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&oe=UTF-8&q=giant+snapping+turtles&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=Ru9WTd_JNoG4twfFnvGVDQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CDwQsAQwAw&biw=1417&bih=690

KNOTTY PROBLEMS

The thing that has been most consistent in our long marriage is that when my husband is out of town, especially when he’s overseas,  certain "events" occur.

Soon after we moved into our new home in the country, he sailed off to Finland. That was a safe distance since I was writing day and night on my master’s thesis. One night at 3 a.m., I was staring at the computer screen in the only enclosed room in our home––my husband’s den. My tired brain was parsing out the delicate relationship between pain and suffering when a bat flew between my face and the computer screen. I hit the floor and the dogs went wild. Luckily, the creature flew out of the den into the main part house, and I slammed the door. “Gotcha!” I said to two blank-faced Aussies.

Of course, the bat had me. I was in a little room, a very cold room, and he had the entire rest of the house. I thought about my situation until 4 a.m. when I could no longer stay awake. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? So I opened the door, and not having a HazMat suit handy, grabbed a small hand towel from the bathroom and placed it on my head. I was not about to offer up a landing strip of my hair for the beast to land on.

The house is wide open––living room, dining room, kitchen, lofted bedroom and TV room, two small third-level lofts. No walls. The state park building, my husband calls it. I took quiet, slow steps through every inch of the place looking for that little Velociraptor. Unfortunately, the walls, beams, and ceiling are knotty pine, and the floors are knotty cyprus. Every one of those thousands of knots had wings.  By 5 a.m., I figured he could just have at me; I was falling asleep. So I climbed into bed and pulled everything I could reach over my face, leaving one tiny slit to breath through. Oddly, I slept.

In the morning, there was no sign of him, so I figured he had exited the house by whatever means he had entered it. I stood at the kitchen sink running water for tea, peering out at the Baltimore Oriole on our feeder. When my near-focus kicked in, I noticed the bat 16 inches in front of my face, wings splayed, clinging to the window over the sink. I grabbed a 13 X 9 inch cake pan from the counter and slammed it against the window over the beast. Ha! Gotcha for real this time!

It’s amazing how hard it is to hold your arm straight out in front of you for long periods of time. Actually, within about 4 minutes, my arm and shoulder were spasming. What I needed was something to slide up between the window and the bat, trapping it in the cake pan so I could humanely return him to the wild. What I needed was a cookie sheet!

The cookie sheets were in the bottom stove drawer about a yard and a half to my left, but I had to hold that pan against the window. I do, however, have a secret weapon––long toes that function like Swiss Army knives. I stretched as far as possible with my left leg and pulled the stove drawer open with my toes. It was a bit tougher to reach down to the bottom of the drawer without letting the cake pan slip. I stretched as far as I could. The cartilage between my ribs was snapping like the elastic on old underpants, however I did reach the cookie sheet. Cookie sheets are much heavier than one notices when lifting them by hand.

I placed the cookie sheet flat against the window right below the cake pan and began to slide it upwards. I truly didn’t want to hurt the bat’s little feet. I went slowly so that it had time to let go of the window and adjust its position in the pan. Somehow I slid the cookie sheet all the way up, and it formed a fine cover for the pan. I could carry the bat safely outside, well contained. I was feeling triumphant or at least a little smug.

Onto the deck we went. Heck, he was just being a bat, acting like a bat should. I held no grudge. I stood on the deck and opened the pan to the sky so that he could return to the wild unharmed. Unfortunately, he clung to the inside of the cake pan. I gave a little shake. I gave a big shake. I smacked the bottom of the pan.

How could I encourage the bat to let go? While I was wondering, he fell out and landed at my feet. And there he sat. The phrase that seeped into my mind at this point was aberrant bat behavior. I do respect nature and the right of all living things to be left alone, but I had no intention of experiencing weeks of rabies shots for this little jerk.

I placed the broom bristles gently against the bat. He was about 6 inches from the railing, and I hoped to urge him through the rails and out of my life. I was very careful to be gentle in case there was some kind of coating on bat wings that might affect flight if it were disturbed. I gave a little nudge, whereupon that filthy sky-rat stood up, spread his wings and growled at me. Even as I raced backwards, I could see that his jaws were open 180 degrees, and he had sabers for teeth.

I grew up on a golf course, so my next move came naturally. I placed the broom squarely in front of me, shoulders even, head down, and swung back keeping my left elbow straight. I drove that sucker right off the deck. And much like golf balls that simply dribble off the tee, he simply fell off the deck and landed in the garden right below me, hissing and growling as he went.

At least he was gone. I turned to go back in the house and looked into the faces of my two dogs. Soon we’d be going for our morning walk. And soon they’d be rounding the house looking for the bat who was still screeching. For a fleeting moment, I thought––hey, they've had rabies shots––.  We hadn’t fully settled into the house. Maybe we could just move. 

I walked out front to the little garden wall I’d built and took the biggest, heaviest rock from the pile. It took all I had to lift it over the deck rail and align it with the still growling bat below me. I let it go. It was a horrible, sickening thud. Horrible and yet at some level, quite satisfying. As far as I know that bat still lines the indentation under the rock, but I’m not checking, even after 15 years.

More on bats:
http://www.defenders.org/wildlife_and_habitat/wildlife/bats.php