Sledding!

Sledding is a very intimate way of appreciating the landscape. You can look at a snowy hill, and think how beautiful it is, but putting your nether bits in direct contact with its contours is a whole 'nother thing.

It's a hugely exciting thing to hurtle down a steep slope, feeling every bump and groundhog burrow under a too-thin covering of snow. Our fastest sled is thin plastic; it cost $6.99 and it fits four people on it. We were given another by a neighbor that cost $130 and while the thick foam insulates from some of the crueler bumps, it's not as much fun as the Green Menace. Saucers generally suck; I don't like going 30 mph backwards and being dumped off without warning. The inflatable, inner-tube style has a lot of potential and is a lot easier on aging tailbones than the aforementioned. There's a lot of spinning with those, too, but it's a cushier ride.

I love the processional out to the slope. Out the driveway, under the drooping snowy pines.


The sumac branches are laden with snow.


Oona tells Liam to MUSH!!
And David carries his homemade sled. David can make anything, including a sled with real downhill skis as runners. David and Mary Jane (here's Mary Jane, a wonderful artist and art teacher, with your blogger)
keep Chet Baker when we go away. They are Chet Baker's West Virginia parents. David and Mary Jane are always hoping we will go away, because they love Chet Baker. And when they visit us, Chet Baker always gets in their car, hoping he can go to Camp Baker. He comes and asks me to go get his bed and food and leash and toys, because he's ready to GO. We always get such a laugh out of his eagerness to go to Camp Baker, where he gets a couple of walks every day, and the chipmunks are naive and there for the taking. Couldn't invoke the doggeh without a photo to slake the Baker thirst. We call this photo Christmas Sweetness. Unfortunately you won't find Chet out on the slopes. He is perfectly happy to stay home by the fire and greet us as we come in, not being a fan of prolonged outings in the snow. The problem has to do with his sparsely-haired undercarriage, well displayed in the photo above. Brr!

The slopes are prime for sledding. That's a big bowl of a hayfield. We are most thankful that the farmer who leases it didn't pasture cattle there last fall. Frozen cowpies are incredibly painful when they connect with your rump through a thin plastic sled.

Sez who?
This is Abby. Abby and her daughter Veronica like to watch us sled. Our sledding parties are probably the most exciting thing that happens to them all year long.

This is Veronica.
Veronica is sort of a bovine Oona.

The common denominators being crippling cuteness and a sturdy build.


It's hard to get Oona to go down the slope on a sled or saucer. She much prefers to give people a mighty shove and send them down, then watch from the top.

The only person who can consistently coax Oona onto a sled is Bill of the Birds. He is very good at talking girls into things, any girl, any thing.

I Do Not Want a French Bulldog.

The only thing I don't like about posting twice a week is having to squeeze the Chet Baker posts in between all the zoo animals and pithy philosophizing. If I'm having Chet Baker withdrawal, what about you?? I can go in and snuzzle Mr. Popcorn Paws any old time. Still miss him on the blog.

No, thank you for the suggestion, I am not going to start another blog devoted to Chet Baker. I am going to keep painting. Here insert emoticon of smiley face. Or winky face, if you're the type who does that. I have been known to do it, but only when I'm pretty sure someone's going to take something the wrong way otherwise. Emoticons. Ecch.

One photo can change a person's outlook. Sometimes a life. I'm thinking, naturally, of some of the famous Life Magazine photos of Viet Nam that are seared into my memory. But because I am by nature a happy, silly person, I'm also thinking of photos like this

of a French bulldog puppy beset with some ridiculous and obviously unworkable footgear
that a Facebook "friend" who shall remain unidentified for now had the temerity to post on my wall. She knew, even as she posted it, that this seemingly innocuous act would set up a barely-controlled puppylust in me, which is just flat out not a fair thing to do to a friend, even an imaginary Facebook friend. Misery loves company; she is suffering from that same puppylust. As for me, I could put that French bulldog on a bun and put a little country mustard on him and have him for lunch, he is that delicious. I did not know they came in anything other than fawn, black, red, black-and-white or brindle and now that I know there is a tricolor variant I am doomed.

This "friend" likely knew in hitting me with this photo that the first breed of dog I decided I wanted when I decided, after 13 years of hemming and hawing, that I wanted a dog (is this still English?) was a French bulldog. Now make that a tricolor French bulldog.

But then I decided that I needed a French bulldog with legs because we would be hiking, oh yes we would, and clambering around these steep slippery Appalachian foothills. And so I put nice long legs on that wish and got a Boston terrier and I think you know that I have never been sorry about that, not one nanosecond have I been sorry I got a Boston terrier instead of a French bulldog.

Until LINDA M. LYSAGHT that RAT FINK sent me that !@#$#!%$# PHOTO. But I am STILL NOT SORRY and I would get a Boston terrier again not that I am even CLOSE to shopping,f because HERE is what a Boston terrier can DO.

This is Chet Baker's patented aerial switcheroo in which he leaps up heading right and flips his hindquarters around and lands heading left. I remember the day he taught himself to do it and it's been his favorite move ever since.

Try that with your little peg legs and your hi-tops, Frenchy. I shall now revel in the natural athleticism of the Boston terrier. This is Chet Baker at his best, modeling the sweater knitted for him by loyal Chetfan Sue Robbins back when he was a puppeh.

I'm sure you could teach a French bulldog to fetch. Well, maybe you could. I hear they're a little headstrong.

But for airs above the ground? Look no further than the seal-brindle marvel that is his Chetness.

These photos are of poor quality, but it is hard to photograph perfection. I included this one because he looks like a man in a Boston terrier suit.

Float like a butterfly. And he doesn't even need to stick his tongue out to do it. I know I'm mixing references to great American athletes here, but forgive me. I am not a sports person.


Michael Jordan, hang your head.


Sometimes you have to give him the stick.

Come on, Chet! Get your stick!

I am not falling for it, Lee Dum. You will just sweep it away like Charlie Brown's football. I know that is what you are going to do, Phee Bee. You are rotten children. And a dog like me does not fall for that stuff.


All right. Brace yourselves. Here I come.



After a workout like that, only Shila knows which muscles to massage.

Mether. How could you ever think of any other breed?

I couldn't, Chet Baker. My heart is yours forever. I will not look at any more pictures on the Internet, I promise. All right, Mether. When bad old Linda sends you more, just cover your eyes.



I will, Chet Baker.

Sara, Mary, Jane(s), Susan(s), Wendi, Chris, Jen(s), Tim, Jason, Maureen: stop kissing your screens. There's your Chet Baker fix. I know, I know. It's been too long. Now wipe your screens. ;-)

:-D

:-/

Collateral Wildlife

Whenever I visit zoos, I like to look for the incidental animals; the animals and birds and fish that are there because they have moved in unbidden, because a zoo is a nice place to live, even when you have a choice. I like to see how the local wildlife, native or not, exploits the zoo environment. Maybe there's a scruffy little gang of house sparrows stealing food out of a fox's dish or picking grain out of zebra dung. Maybe there's a complex of Norway rat tunnels running under the tiger's pen.

Maybe there's a cottontail rabbit, hiding under the shrubbery that screens the chimp compound.

Maybe there's a giant Canada goose, product of an aggressive stocking program and now an overabundant resident year-round throughout much of the U.S., hoping for a handout.

Maybe there's a shadow under a mallard, that shadow resolving into a huge carp.

The mallard, a native species that gladly exploits easy resources, is here because people throw food around at zoos.

The carp, a European exotic that has invaded virtually every slow-moving waterway in North America, is here because it's hoping the mallards will miss the bread people are bound to throw to them. We have come to an uneasy peace with this big, mud-plain fish. There's no getting rid of it now.
The carp beseech me for food. There's no question in my mind that they're looking right into my eyes, begging. I have lived with their gaudy cultivars, the koi, long enough to know that look. It's pretty darned effective, for a fish.

I think about the giant Asian carp, a different and even more damaging species, now trying to make a beachhead in Lake Michigan, about the frantic efforts to turn them away from this precious, as yet Asian carp-free inland sea. Lawsuits are being brought by Ohio, Minnesota and Michigan to close a Chicago lock system that will, no matter how much we shock or poison it, inevitably allow them entry into the Great Lakes. These huge fish leap en masse from the water when a boat passes by, and have killed people unfortunate enough to be hit by their giant bodies. They make deserts of lakes and rivers by vacuuming up all the plankton and collapsing the food chain. They make sure that nothing survives but Asian carp, wherever they occur. Chicago is going to have to figure out how to transport goods by land, it seems. The environmental cost of having an open passage between Illinois' Asian carp-infested waters and Lake Michigan is simply tremendous, and entirely unacceptable. I wish my state luck in bringing pressure to bear on Chicago to close the locks before it's too late. I do not want to see Lake Erie seething with Asian carp, and no one else does, too. But this is the nature of aquatic exotics: they are incorrigible, unstoppable. The least we can do is seal off the obvious points of entry. And hope there's no one stupid or sick enough to introduce them on purpose.


These are European carp, but you get the point.

A ring-billed gull also waits for a handout. Populations of this little native gull exploded with the inception of landfills and shopping centers, strip malls, fast-food places and open Dumpsters. And it's almost single-handedly cleaned out native nesting piping plovers in the Great Lakes.

Lovely bird, just doing its job.


Outside the zoo gates, a low-paid person in a dog suit shills for Petland, hoping to lure people in to buy the tragic output of puppy mills.

Sometimes I wish I could stop thinking about connections, about collateral damage. Why can't I just look at the pretty birds, the big fish, the cute puppies? Why must I see the clumsy hand of man laid so heavily on the animal kingdom wherever I look?

What's that on the Chinese Christmas light string on the Japanese birches near the Asian elephant compound?

Why, it's a ruby-crowned kinglet. A native migrant, passing through Columbus as it flees the Canadian winter and fetching up for a few days at the zoo.

Oh, I needed that. Thank you. I love flamingos and gorillas and elephants, but you're something else again. It's so good to see you here. What a silly perch for a pretty bird.

Gorillas-The Buff Vegetarians

I find beauty in the great apes, in their thoughtful faces and in their great power. This is Anakka, who turns 25 in June. And he's a redhead, too! See the red hair? This magnificent silverback in his prime has three females in his social group. One is Toni, who is 38 years old and the youngest and only surviving first generation offspring of Colo, the famous elderly female gorilla I spoke about in the last post.


Toni has such a lovely face; she looks like her mother, Colo. Toni has given birth to seven babies. She was born in Columbus but spent about a dozen years at the Detroit Zoo. Zoo animals need to travel so that their precious genes can be spread around. When she came back to Columbus, her mother Colo barely acknowledged her--she clearly knew her, but because Toni had been taken away from Colo for hand-raising, the mother-daughter bond was not as strong as it might have been. However Toni's first baby, Jumoke, and Colo were very close. When Jumoke had her first gorilla child, great-grandma Colo practically raised that baby herself, as Jumoke was very young and didn't know what to do. Even though Colo was the brains behind the operation, Jumoke goes down as the first third-generation captive-bred gorilla to raise her own young.

When gorillas are kept in social groups, they teach each other, and the protocol of having zoo staff artificially raise their infants is falling by the wayside as we finally allow these animals to live as they are meant to--in closely bonded family groups, where culture and knowledge can be handed down from mother to daughter to great-granddaughter.

Sexy beast! Here's the back view of Anakka. I look at that musculature and wonder why a gentle vegetarian needs to be so very buff.

Here's a theory, and it's only the Science Chimp, ruminating. har har... If you're going to eat little else but raw stems and leaves, you need a capacious stomach, a rumen, almost, with which to digest such low-protein fare. So you have this huge belly, this vital digestive apparatus, to haul around, which is continually full of a great deal of vegetation. If you're going to sleep in trees so you don't get killed by a leopard in the night, you have to have some seriously massive muscles to pull yourself into the canopy to build your nest.

All this makes you mighty and ferocious-looking and impressive, even if you don't really need to be and rarely use it. A buff vegetarian. It was this fearsome appearance that gave rise to the old wives' tales about gorilla ferocity that in turn spawned movies like King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. Researchers like Dian Fossey showed us gorillas as they really are: meek, retiring, slightly lazy, peaceable. Jane Goodall showed us chimpanzees as they really are, and their reality is a good bit scarier to me than that of gorillas--organized hunting expeditions to rob mother baboons of their babies, infanticide, even planned inter-troop warfare...behavior not seen in gorillas. Good thing the huge ape is the peaceable one.

I am indebted to Sue Allison Roberts, Columbus Zoo docent since 2004, for the family history here. Don't blame her for my harebrained theorizing. Sue told me so many tidbits about the Columbus gorillas, but my favorite one was this. A number of years ago, Dian Fossey came to the Columbus Zoo to give a lecture. Sue said she seemed ill at ease, nervous, awkward among the admiring crowds who attended--a portrait that is borne out by biographers. They closed off the gorilla exhibit and let Dian be there with the animals. She talked to them in the grunts and belches of their kind; she spent several hours observing and being observed by them. And when she came out, she said, and I paraphrase here: "I see a lot of gorillas as I go around and give lectures at zoos. And your gorillas aren't crazy. Good job."

Speaking of not crazy, I am deliriously happy to be painting again, tackling work after work without procrastination or its evil mother, fear. The only way to paint is just to do it, not to think about it endlessly. Having been away from it for so long, I think I need to prove something to myself. I keep tackling more and more challenging subjects. I hope that urge will dissipate. But there's always a walk through fire when I switch brain hemispheres. Now the writer in me is yelling to be let out of her garret. Sometimes I wish I could split like a hydra. Instead, I wind up scribbling notes for my next essay down the margins of whatever I'm painting. So glad it's cruel old winter for awhile longer. Holing up and producing is just what I need to do. I'm not ready for the woodcock's dance just yet.

“I arise torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. It makes it hard to plan the day.”

E. B. White

Beautiful Colo

How I wish I could know what she's thinking.

Colo the western lowland gorilla is a gorilla of firsts. She was the first gorilla to be born in captivity, anywhere in the world. Her parents, Millie and Baron Macombo, were wild caught by "Gorilla Bill" Said of Bexley, Ohio, in what was then French Cameroon. They arrived in New York on December 22, 1950, and the Columbus Zoo agreed to take them on since they had no planned destination. It was an historic decision. Six years later, on December 22, 1956, Millie gave birth to Colo (short for Columbus), starting a string of "firsts" in the captive breeding of gorillas. Before Colo's birth, we didn't even know the gestation period of gorillas, which turns out to be about 250 days.

Colo's daughter Emmy was the first second-generation captive bred gorilla in the world, and her granddaughter Cora was the first third-generation captive bred gorilla. Colo was also grandmother to the first gorilla twins ever born in the western hemisphere, and the first surviving gorilla to be conceived by artificial insemination was also a grandchild of Colo's.

The Columbus Zoo has paved the way for other zoos in creating naturalistic habitats for their gorillas, including a huge outdoor play area rife with climbing equipment, swings and ropes. Here, the animals blossom and relate to each other much as they would in the wild, in family groups.

Colo is the oldest gorilla in the world. On December 22, 2009, she celebrated her 53rd birthday. It doesn't seem all that old to me, but gorillas age differently from humans. So little genetic distance between us, and yet we're so different. Colo's got some pretty bad arthritis to deal with, something a wild gorilla might not live long enough to develop. She takes an arthritis drug approved for humans each day.

I know. Every time I eat something, I have to dig part of it back out, too, Colo. Comes with the territory for primates of a certain age.

I became curious about the glass that separates the gorillas from people, so I asked zoo docent Sue Roberts whether they could see us as well as we can see them. "Oh yes!" she replied. And she went on to say that they love watching people--it's a kind of enrichment for them to have someone to observe. Colo seemed very contemplative, but her eyes moved around as she took note of our behavior.
Our kids were rapt, watching her watch them.
And very respectful of this old lady, this gorilla of many firsts. And it's all happened right here in Ohio.

Here's Sue's snapshot of Colo after she finished opening her last present at her 53rd birthday party last December 22. Tuckered out and full of cake.

photo by Sue Allison Roberts

For a lovely video of Colo's 53rd birthday celebration, click here.

Thanks again to Sue Roberts for helping open the world of Columbus' gorillas to me.

I'm spending part of this rainy Sunday canning blog preserves, including a step-by-step series on a complex watercolor of battling prairie chickens. I'm putting the finishing touches on the painting as I write. Not sure why each painting I start is more challenging than the last, but I'm choosing to take it as a positive sign. It feels great to be painting again. Thanks for your understanding.

Liam and the Silverback

People sometimes ask me what my favorite bird or animal might be. I can't ever say. It's like asking me which of my kids is my favorite. Can't do it. I have no trouble telling you my favorite breed of dog (Shih-Tzu, of course)
but the favoritism stops there.

I will say that as a young kid, younger than Liam, I was completely obsessed with great apes. I acted like a chimpanzee and had an incredibly convincing pant-hoot and set of mannerisms, including knuckle-walking. It was part of my obsession with Jane Goodall's work, the incredible things we learned about these creatures thanks to her diligence and love.

And to this day, I linger longest in the great ape house at any zoo. I will never forget being privileged to stay after hours to watch the Columbus gorillas prepare their night nests. The kids and Bill and I huddled quietly, feeling as if we were intruding in a boudoir. And we were, but the gorillas were gracious about it.

I think much of the fascination for me as an artist is watching the human/animal line blur and dissolve as I watch the great apes. We are so very close in genetic makeup, and yet worlds and civilizations apart from them.
Mumbah the silverback western lowland gorilla was enjoying some epic nose-picking up close to the glass. Naturally, Liam was fascinated. We began to sing a little song: "Everybody's doin' it, doin' it, doin' it, Pickin' their nose and...

It wasn't a very polite song. Mumbah didn't mind. He kept on mining.

Liam watched, rapt. Just the thing for an inveterate Captain Underpants fan, aged 10. And suddenly Mumbah turned his great head and acknowledged this snowy little ape.

Liam tilted his head, and their eyes met for a long and delicious moment.

It is rare for any of the gorillas to acknowledge a visitor, we learned from the Columbus Zoo's wonderful docent, Sue Allison Roberts. But Mumbah has a special liking for young boys. There is a boy who comes to the zoo frequently to draw quietly and be near the gorillas, and Mumbah comes over to stay with him, just a pane of glass away. Sue saw him put his great black palm against the glass to touch the boy's palm one day.

Perhaps Mumbah picked up the artistic bent in Liam. Perhaps it was Liam's special gentleness that attracted him. Maybe he thought our song was funny. We'll never know. But Liam was electrified by this contact.
And Mumbah went back to his toilette.
All photos of Liam and Mumbah in this post are by Bill of the Birds

who had the right lens to catch the moment.

Animals, animals... day after day they save me from unbroken gray skies and days of solitude. I had an out-of-body experience the other night as the kids and I sat on the couch, switching between reruns of "The Office" and the inane, inordinately painful auditions for "American Idol." Don't ask why we watch it. We don't know. It's a bonding experience for me and the kids.

There I was, a kid on either side, their legs draped across mine. In each kid's fist was a sleepy Chinese dwarf hamster. On my knee was Charlie the 23-year-old macaw, adding his voluble commentary to the auditions, laughing, gasping and imitating my hacking cough to perfection. On the back of the couch, acting as a warm, jerky neck pillow, was Chet Baker, his paws wrapped around a Nylabone. Crounchcrounchcrounchcrounch. It is our peaceable kingdom, a raucous, hilarious place, and having kids and animals around to love and care for gets me through.