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Epicentricity

August 21, 2009 - View Single Entry

I just spent some time on the Vineyard Gazette's website. They've set up a Summer White House blog, probably trying to catch the eye of the royal, uh, wait, make that "first" family. Gush gush gush. One of the more interesting articles used a panel on race relations to jump into a discussion of the African American summer community. Such panels take place every summer, gathering eminent luminaries to talk about subjects of "great socio-political import," and the ticket price is often $50 and up -- to be fair, it's generally a benefit for something. To the best of my knowledge, "Year-Round Martha's Vineyard Considered as an Occupied Country" has never come up. If it ever does, I'll buy myself a ticket and probably get thrown out for giving a long-winded floor speech.

Anyway, Professor Charles Ogletree, friend and lawyer to Professor Henry L. Gates, Jr., was quoted as saying this: “This is the epicenter for intellectual and social dialogue in the country. You look at the variety of people that are here: it’s not comparable to anywhere else in the world.”

I look at those people and you bet I'm impressed. I've read several of them and admire most of them. But astute as they are about inclusion and non-discrimination (because they've been excluded and discriminated against), they're not looking hard enough. They're forgetting that this "epicenter" floats in at the beginning of the summer and floats out at the end. Its connection to year-round Martha's Vineyard is tenuous. Year-round Martha's Vineyard is here mainly to pour the wine, clean the houses, ring up the groceries, gas up the cars, and do all the support work that helps keep that "intellectual and social dialogue" going. We couldn't *possibly* have anything to contribute to that dialogue, could we? Hell no, we're just the year-round residents of the seasonally occupied territories.

All through the "Gates affair" I kept waiting for the good professor to make the connection. He was treated like an alien in his own home, and we're treated as invisible in ours. Anyone up for a "teaching moment"?

No Bread

August 20, 2009 - View Single Entry

I was going to title this one "No Bread, No Fair," but though I like the double entendre, neither part of it is true so "No Bread" will have to do. Yesterday I was baking bread for the fair, which starts today. It was hot sultry humid hot. Despite the amount of rye flour (almost half the total) in it, and the fact that it was powered by sourdough (no one told my starters that sourdough rising is supposed to be leisurely), the dough rose much too fast. I put the bowl in a dishpan of cold water. It still rose pretty fast, so I punched it down and let it rise again. When I loafed it, I put the two loaf pans in the fridge. My fridge is 3/4 size and usually full, so making room took some ingenuity. This greatly slowed the rising, but it also meant it wasn't ready to bake when I had to go do barn chores. I removed loaf pans from fridge, set them on the counter (it was 5 o'clock by then, and a little cooler but not much), and went to the barn.

When I got back, the dough hadn't risen all that much. It probably felt as soggy and listless as I did. I made up and baked some cranberry walnut quick bread -- it came out fine -- and finally baked the sourdough rye, hoping the oven heat would give it enough lift to round the tops a bit. It didn't. It tastes OK but it's heavy and it isn't especially appetizing to look at. I decided not to take it to the fair. I briefly considered thawing one of the two loaves in my freezer, a nice-looking sourdough raisin whole wheat, and entering that -- but no. Frozen and thawed isn't fair quality, and niggling at the back of my mind was the possibility, real but remote, that the judges would scrawl "faint taste of freezer" on the card.

I also considered just entering the quick bread, but my quick breads haven't fared (sorry!) all that well in the past, and besides, to me yeast breads are the real deal and quick breads are "anyone can do it" stuff. So I gave one of the loaves to my neighbors, one will go with me to a cookout tonight, and the other will stay home.

So -- no bread in the fair this year. Sunday, though, Travvy and I are going in the dog show, and we'll be participating in teacher Karen's Rally demonstration. It's supposed to be cooler by the end of the weekend, and Karen's got a place staked out in the shade near the ferris wheel.

It feels a little weird not to be entering bread this year, but I was already feeling a little lackadaisical "pro forma" about the whole thing: I'm doing it because I always do it. Several baking categories got cut this year; there used to be two yeast bread categories, light and dark, and now there's only one. Mostly, though -- bread and sourdough have loomed so large in my life and writing this year that even a blue ribbon would seem insignificant. After four and a half years in an apartment with no oven, it was important for me to get my bread-baking groove back; I've done it, time to move on.

The bread thing was getting predictable. Travvy, on the other hand, is anything but. Travvy at the fair? That's a challenge!

Tugger

August 15, 2009 - View Single Entry

Tugger and Theo are the barn cats. Theo is light gray with white feet and facial markings. Tugger is solid dark gray. The two of them together probably weigh close to 40 pounds, which is why the shelf they eat on is breaking away from the tack room window. The morning chores person gives them a half cup of kitty kibble in their (small) feed bowl, and the evening person puts the bowl back in the cat food bin. To spare the food shelf, a length of 1-by-4 board, we sometimes put a handful of food on the bench under the window. It's usually Tugger who snags the feeding station that demands less exertion. The trouble with the bench is that it's at nose level for a large dog, which is why when Travvy gets out of the truck at the barn he wants to go immediately to the tack room to see what's around for snacking.

Travvy, in case I haven't mentioned it lately, is great with other dogs and with people but completely unreliable around small animals, especially small animals moving rapidly away from him. Three times now he has caught a skunk and been sprayed for his efforts; in each case, as far as I know, the skunk escaped unharmed. When Theo is eating or Tugger is sprawled on an Adirondack chair outside, I let Trav -- on leash, of course -- approach within a few feet and sit. Then we play the "Look at That" game -- when he's looking at the cat, I say "Look at that!" and click, then when he reorients to me I click and give him a treat. Sometimes the cats pretend to ignore him. Other times they hiss.

So Thursday morning it was drizzling a bit so instead of tethering Travvy outside I attached his leash to one of the crossties in the barn's main aisle. This gives him plenty of room to lie down and move around a bit, but the radius of crosstie + leash only reaches about three-quarters of the way across the aisle, so there's plenty of room for a cat to get by. I'd just dumped the wheelbarrow in the manure pile and was standing in the barn door when Tugger comes sauntering across the lawn in my wake. Travvy is, of course, rapt. Tugger steps onto the concrete floor of the barn. Travvy is quivering with anticipation. Tugger keeps coming.

Right down the middle of the aisle. I am frozen in place. Travvy starts to move. Tugger turns and snarls at him. Travvy pounces. Tugger is in his mouth. I pounce. I grab Travvy around the neck from behind and yell, "DROP IT!" He hesitates a moment, then he lets Tugger go. Tugger makes a beeline for the ladder and escapes to the hayloft.

Now what? I praise Travvy for obeying the "drop it" command and hope he doesn't take this to mean that I think cats are fair game. Then I climb the ladder to look for Tugger. His speed and agility are a good sign: if neck or back were broken, he couldn't have managed it, and his legs all seemed to be working fine. When Rhodry was seven or so, he and a buddy had cornered a cat belong to the buddy's owner. No one saw what happened, but the cat wound up with a punctured lung and died in surgery. So I'm seriously worried about the possibility of internal injury. Travvy has powerful teeth. For a while there I sported band-aids on the knuckles of my left thumb and forefinger because Travvy dinged them so often snatching the treats I was offering him, and he wasn't trying to take my fingers off.

"Harder than finding a needle in a haystack" means "impossible." Finding a cat in a well-stocked hayloft isn't much easier. Finding a cat who doesn't want to be found is likewise futile, and I'm not 100 percent sure I want to find the cat. Schrödinger rules: As long as I don't know Tugger is dead, dying, or seriously injured, then Tugger is OK. I move some bales around and peer behind them. It's hopeless. There are too many bales, and the only available light is what comes up from the center aisle or through the cracks in the door. I give up.

All day I'm hoping that when I show up to do evening chores Tugger will be chowing down on the food shelf or sprawling on one of the chairs outside. After all, the da Silvas' white rooster survived the Jaws of Travvy, if only to meet the stew pot a few weeks later, and Travvy had dropped Tugger a lot faster than he dropped the rooster. But when I arrive, it's Theo who's at the food bowl. Tugger is nowhere in sight. Mark appears with Bleu, the Briard. I tell him what happened. He goes to check out the hayloft but doesn't find anything either.

Friday I don't go to the barn till late afternoon. There's a note from Breeze about paddock arrangements and at the end it says, "No sign of Tugger. :-(" I climb up to the hayloft. I don't really expect to see Tugger stretched out on top of a bale of hay. If Tugger is OK, he's probably long since left the loft to nurse his trauma somewhere else. But the weather has turned warm and humid, and I take heart that the hayloft smells only of hay -- not, for instance, of decomposing cat.

The glimpse of gray I catch on the Adirondack chair favored by Tugger turns out, of course, to be Theo. Theo shows no interest in Tugger's absence. It could be that he is keeping Tugger's whereabouts secret from the enemy, but I suspect he doesn't really care. Neither does Travvy. For Travvy the incident is long forgotten. He doesn't hold a grudge against me for making him drop his catch. Prey drive is prey drive, and in malamutes it often runs strong. Whatever distinction a dog makes between cats and rabbits is learned behavior, and at some point -- higher in some dogs, lower in others -- drive trumps learned behavior almost every time.

This afternoon I get to the barn late. When I see Mark, I ask if there's been any sign of Tugger, hoping that whatever sign there might have been isn't a stench or a corpse. But no: Mark reports that Breeze saw him earlier in the day and he was fine.

Whew. Next time, Tugger, take the long way around the dog.

Dough Dog

August 12, 2009 - View Single Entry

Susanna was playing with a big ball, only it was not a real ball because it was not round and it smelled like cookies. She was pushing it and punching it. Then she went to the big white cold air box to get something. I took a bite of the ball. It was good! It tasted like cookies with raisins in them! Then Susanna turned around. Uh-oh. She said, "No no no no no! You cannot eat my dough!"

I had to go in my crate. She pretended she was mad and she did not look at me. I looked very sad. She still did not look at me. I kept looking very sad. Finally she peeked at me and then she started laughing. (Laughing is like woo-woo-wooing.) She said, "You are a very sneaky puppy," and she let me out of my crate.

If I had a brother or sister, they could make a diversion and I could eat more dough! Maybe they could have some too. Susanna says I am more than enough dog for anybody. She put the dough in the little white hot air box and when it came out it was bread. I like bread too. If Susanna leaves it near the edge of the counter, maybe I will get some bread.

Your friend,

Travvy

Luck

August 11, 2009 - View Single Entry

We're back to sauna weather. As long as I sit at the computer (aka "worshipping at Morgana's altar"), which is sensibly located under the ceiling fan, all is well. If I get up and walk 10 feet, I need a shower. It does cool off a little in late afternoon, though, and I thought I might get a ride in. My bedsheets and a few other things were hanging on the line, Travvy was out on the deck, and I headed out for the barn.

First I had to go to SBS, on the outskirts of Vineyard Haven, to pick up some horse stuff and some dog stuff. When I came out, raindrops were starting to splatter the windshield. They splattered harder and harder, and by the time I was approaching the turnoff for Allie's barn, we were having the kind of torrential downpour you can barely see to drive through. Poor Travvy! I thought. Oh, no! My laundry!

I have two sets of sheets. The winter flannels are in the cedar chest. The summer cottons were on the line. What the hell, I'll sleep in a T-shirt.

The laundry would be drenched no matter what, but I had to rescue my dog -- and grab my rain slicker. I passed the turnoff and headed down Old County Road toward home. A mile or so along the rain slackened and started to taper off. That's not so bad, I figured. The laundry's lost, Travvy will be fine -- so I pulled a U-ie at the end of Skiff's Lane and headed back down-island. Within minutes I was driving through another one of those downpours you can't see through. I reversed direction again, this time at the end of Pine Lane, and went home.

By the time I reached the West Tisbury School the sun was out and the road was bone dry. So was the dirt of Halcyon Way, and if my laundry wasn't exactly bone dry, it was considerably dryer than it had been coming out of the washing machine. Travvy likewise was dry but glad to see me. I studied the sky. It didn't look like a squall was incoming. I left my slicker on its hook, loaded Travvy into the truck, and once again headed down-island.

The far end of Old County Road was still dark with rainwater. Droplets fell from the leaves overhead and splattered my windshield. It really had rained here and not there, or there and not here, depending on where I'm standing. Didn't get to ride, but I have dry sheets to sleep on. That's good.