Monthly Archives: August 2013

The Green Tide

Posted on by

Kudzu is one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time. It was introduced in the United States from Asia at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition’s Japanese Pavilion in 1876, and in the South at the New Orleans Exposition in 1884-86. It seemed like a miracle plant. It was hardy and fast-growing, it tolerated poor soil, livestock liked to eat it, and it had a wonderfully fragrant flower. What could possibly go wrong? By the 1930’s, it was promoted as a livestock food for farmers to grow. By 1935 it was promoted as an erosion-control plant, and Soil Conservation Service nurseries began producing seedlings. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, between 1935 and 1942, Soil Conservation Service nurseries produced a hundred million seedlings. They were  spreading this stuff everywhere.

By the 1950s, people were having second thoughts. Today it has been reported as an invasive species in states from the Deep South, as far up the Atlantic coast as Connecticut, and in Oregon and North Dakota.

And right here just down the street from us.

I, for one, do not welcome our kudzu overlords

I, for one, do not welcome our kudzu overlords

Kudzu has a kind of mythic and yet comical status in the South. One of the Atlanta television stations had a news helicopter that used to routinely report on the various objects that kudzu was covering, from abandoned houses to old school buses. I suspect that it’s not so funny if it’s your property that the kudzu is invading.

Look out Zeke!

Look out Zeke!

This is on Lavender Trail across Fouche Gap Road, where kudzu has covered several boulders that mark the edge of the road at the dead-end turnaround.

One of my uncles, since deceased, liked to tell tales. He had a small farm and was pretty familiar with farming. He said that kudzu was great food for cattle, but if you planted it in a field, although the cattle would eat it, it would eventually spread beyond the fence. He said the only way to safely plant kudzu was to put a fenced area within a cattle pasture and plant kudzu within that interior pen. The cattle would then eat any kudzu that tried to spread outside the pen. It was hard to know whether to take him seriously or not.

This is what can happen if kudzu is not controlled. I found this image online, but it’s not an uncommon sight around here.

Online image of kudzu covering trees

Online image of kudzu covering trees

The kudzu on the mountain was blooming this week. Kudzu blooms have a deep, strong, sweet odor. Sometimes you can smell the blooms from quite a distance. In this case, I had to pull a bloom close to my nose to smell it last weekend. By this weekend, although the blooms were still visible, I couldn’t detect any odor at all.

Kudzu flowers

Kudzu flowers

There is a patch of kudzu growing across the street from one of our neighbors down on Fouche Gap Road. Now it has spread to the ditch in front of their house. I’m afraid it’s a mistake to allow that to happen.

I am keeping an eye on the kudzu growing on the property next to our neighbors on the other side of Wildlife Trail. It has covered and killed several large trees, and it’s trying to send tendrils across Lavender Trail. That would put it in the yard of our neighbor on the other side of Lavender Trail. Our neighbor’s yard and Wildlife Trail serve as a firebreak, but I don’t entirely trust it.

Another old picture

Posted on by

I’m sure no one finds these old pictures as interesting as me, but here’s another one. It’s a scan of a Polaroid that had a lot of dust on it.

Me, with Jesse riding shotgun

Me, with Jesse riding shotgun

This was taken in 1979. I was 29 and had only recently adopted Jesse. As you can see, my hand is on Jesse. Any time I was close enough to touch her, I had my hand on her. The VW is a 1972 bus, the best of a dozen or so that my friend Errol and I looked at in Atlanta. Jesse and I were getting ready to take a trip in this picture. We went up to New Kensington, Pa, to see my brother, and then out to Colorado and New Mexico to visit Errol’s brother Tom.

I’ll point out a few things of interest. Behind me you can see two foam mattresses. The lower was Jesse’s at night, and the higher one was mine. My father figured a way to span the gap between the third row seat and the driver’s seat with a bunk. It worked great. Jesse rode on the bunk during the day with her head on my shoulder. She was a good traveler.

You can see that there was a time that I had no gray hair in my beard, and I had a full head of hair. And no spare tire. For any runners, the shoes I am wearing are the great-grandfather of all modern running shoes, the Nike Waffle Trainer. I bought a pair of them in San Francisco in 1977 to train for and run in a marathon held near Carson City, Nevada. My knees worked in those days.

The Airstream trailer in the background was the one my parents used for several years to travel all over the country, and into Mexico and Canada.

The VW had the same old air-cooled four-cylinder engine that the Beetle had. It would do just about 60 miles per hour on the highway. It had no air conditioning, but if you opened the driver’s window and cranked the huge sunroof open a little, there was a smooth, relatively quiet flow of air through the cab. It was bearable even in the summer. In the winter, however, the pitiful little puff of lukewarm air that came through the heater vents was just about enough to keep frost off of your toenails.

Jesse and I spent a lot of nights in that old VW. We stayed in campgrounds, in rest areas and in parking lots.

There is really no context in which you can say that an old VW bus was a good car. It was slow and dangerous. On the front end there was literally nothing but a thin piece of sheet metal between you and the world. The rule was, if it looks like a car is going to hit you, lift your legs.

But I miss it.

When I say I would like to have it back again, what I really mean is that I would like to be 29 again.

Friday Felines

Posted on by

Grasshoppers are common around here. So are cats. It was inevitable that the two would meet.

Chloe and the grasshopper

Chloe and the grasshopper

She was interested, but not interested enough to do anything.

I wish cats ate grasshoppers.

On the trail with BD and Jesse

Posted on by

I got Jesse from the pound in Atlanta in 1979 when I was bumming around after quitting work at the Augusta newspaper (That was the second time; that time it took, and I never went back.) Her cage had a sign identifying her as a Dalmatian named Sugar who was not good with children. She wasn’t a Dalmatian. I think she was mostly some kind of birddog. She was too smart to be a Dalmatian. She was not “Sugar”. There was no way I was going to step outside and scream, “SUGAR!!!” So she became Jesse. And I suspect that it was kids who were not good with her.

She went everywhere with me. When I brought her home to my parents’, she came inside with me, the first dog ever allowed to stay inside my mother’s house. When I decided to go to graduate school at Georgia Tech, a requirement for finding a place to stay was that dogs be allowed.

She was good company, much better, in fact, than any roommate I had while at Tech. Every day when I came home I changed clothes and walked her a couple of blocks to a vacant area where I could let her run free for an hour or so.

I ran too, but it didn’t relieve all the stress.

Graduate school is stressful. My brother, who also got his PhD from Georgia Tech, said several times he thought he just couldn’t take any more, so he went home and started packing. Me, too. Graduate school is like working full time and going to school full time. Coursework means you always take your work home with you, or, most likely, don’t go home until all the work is done.

School was not the only source of stress. I lived about three blocks from I-75. There was a railroad line just behind the houses across the street from where I lived. Jets flew over all the time to Hartsfield or to one of the local airports. The noise was constant: cars, trucks, trains, airplanes. Sometimes I would stand in the driveway and listen, and think, if I don’t get away from this noise I am going to go freaking crazy.

So on some weekends I would drive up to northeast Georgia where there were several places to access the Appalachian Trail. Saturday mornings I would pack my stuff, load Jesse into the car and drive a couple of hours to a trail crossing. I would walk into the woods at a leisurely pace, stop somewhere for lunch, walk on a bit and find a nice, level campsite not too far off the trail. We spent the night and then walked back to the car on Sunday morning. A lot of people consider backpacking a competitive sport. Their goal is miles. My goal was to get away from things for a while, so I almost never went more than six miles or so along the trail.

Jesse probably ran two or three miles for every mile I walked. She was kind of like our current dog Zeke, who runs wild when he’s off the leash. But Jesse was reliable; she always came back. She kept track of me. She would run off ahead of me, and then after a while, come running back to me and take off in the opposite direction. Sometimes she would disappear ahead of me and then show up behind me. She was always orbiting me.

I loved those hikes.

It took me five and a half years to finish at Tech. I went to work in Huntsville, Alabama, in June 1986. I still occasionally went backpacking in Georgia, but it was a considerably longer drive. I don’t think my father ever went hiking with me when I was at Tech, but he did after I graduated. These pictures are from a hike we made in the fall of 1987. My father was 70 years old then. He looked damned good, and he managed the hikes at least as well as I did. All of these pictures are scanned from my old 35 mm slides.

BD at an overlook. Look at the old Army canteen.

BD at an overlook. Look at the old Army canteen.

About “BD”. My brother and I called our father Daddy. Apparently as very small boys we started calling him Pop, but he objected, so he became Daddy from then on. Our mother was Mother, but our father was Daddy. At some time many years ago, we started calling him Big Daddy. I don’t know where it came from, or even exactly when it started. I must have been pretty young. “Big Daddy” became “BD”. Long after we had grown up, if we ever had to write a note to him to leave on the kitchen counter, we addressed it to BD. My brother got him a black baseball cap with BD embroidered in yellow. We still have that cap somewhere.

On the trail

On the trail

Setting up camp

Setting up camp. Jesse is thirsty.

On this particular hike, we lost Jesse for a while. We had been walking when we realized that we hadn’t seen her for a long time. It was odd, because she usually checked in with us every 20 or 30 minutes. So we stopped to wait for her. We called some, but mainly just waited. I was pretty confident that she would find us if she was able to move, because I had already had some experience with her scenting ability.

So we sat and waited. I don’t remember how long it took, but she eventually showed up. She was very tired. I think she might have come back to the trail and somehow decided to go back towards the car. I think she ran all the way back to the car, saw we weren’t there, and then turned around and ran back to us. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s always been what I thought.

Another thing I have thought all these years is that Jesse had caught and killed something. I saw the blood on the side of her face and assumed it was from another animal. It was only recently that I had reason to rethink that. As I posted before, on one of Zeke’s unauthorized, wild romps through the woods, he snagged one of his ears on something and the flopping ear left blood all over the side of his face within the radius of his ear. If you look at Jesse’s face, you can see a similar pattern. Her ears were longer than Zeke’s, so it left a bigger trace. So, after all these years, I finally know that Jesse didn’t kill something, she just snagged her ear. Not that she never killed anything; she was pure hell on possums. But not this time.

Jesse, recovering, with blood from her ear

Jesse, recovering, with blood from her ear

I guess it was not long after this that I took another hike with Jesse. She did her usual wild running, but this time it was different. We were about a mile from the car on our way back on Sunday when she ran up behind me, came around ahead of me and laid down across the trail. The message couldn’t have been clearer: she needed to rest. I sat down and gave her a while to recover. Then I said, “Come on, Jesse, let’s go.” She got up, walked about 20 feet, then laid down again. This time I had to make her get up. We had to get back to the car, and I knew she could rest as long as she wanted once she got into the back seat.

Jesse, at rest

Jesse, at rest

I thought she was tired because she had not been getting as much exercise as she used to, and she was at least eight years old. Now I think she must have already had the cancer that killed her the next year.

When I look at these pictures of Jesse I feel a strong urge to reach out and stroke her knotty head. I would always put my hand on her head and scratch it. Sometimes she closed her eyes when I did that.

I could physically feel her head under my hand for years after she died.

I can still feel it if I try.

Getting stoned

Posted on by

When I was planning to build our house, I thought that T1-11 siding would be fine. It looks, or at least is intended to look, like vertical boards. It’s used as a finish siding in lots of applications, but most of the books I read to prepare for construction recommended against that.

But of course I knew better.

It turned out that the T1-11 siding was OK for the short term, but over the years was beginning to show some weathering. I also had allowed the siding to be too close to the ground at the northeast corner of the house.

This is what the house looked like about two and a half years ago, before we had new siding installed and before I solved the problem of having siding too close to the ground. I had already made a horizontal cut at the height of the lowest masonry wall and started to pull nails from the siding.

Just getting started

Just getting started

Here is what I found after I removed the siding. The dark edge at the lower left part of the front wall is water damage. I removed the old sheathing from the corner and put new sheathing up to cover the insulation you can see. Then I put up two layers of roofing felt, or tarpaper as I used to know it. I then screwed a layer of cement board over the roofing felt as a base for my next planned upgrade. As you can see, the new siding went up during this process.

The big reveal

The big reveal

Roofing felt and new siding

Roofing felt and new siding

Here is what I have been working on for about a year. We decided on a cultured stone product. It’s actually a cement product that is formed in molds and colored to look like stone. It is convincing if it’s installed properly. This shows the elevated front walk that I have mentioned before.

stonework in progress

In the meantime I also started some additional landscaping. The two hollies are transplants from the other side of the house. The stonework around the hollies uses native stone I find around the lot and here and there on the mountain. The wheelbarrow is not a part of the permanent landscaping, although it does make frequent appearances.

I finished the north-facing walls except under our front walk about a year or so ago. I have been having trouble motivating myself to finish the wall under the front walk and along the foundation of the garage, but I finally prodded myself into it. I expect to have this part of the foundation finished by the end of next weekend. Then I start on the other side of the garage foundation and out to the rear of the house. That will be a substantial amount of work, at least as much as I have already done.

And then I need to do the east foundation wall, which is only about three feet high. I want to get all the concrete covered by the time I finish.

And then I need to work on the front walk. It needs stain, and the handrail is in bad shape. I’m thinking man-made materials here, too.