Extremely Depressing Phenology

Just a quick one...Wow, this web site's traffic is waaay up, only something seems to be wrong somewhere. Usually traffic goes way down over holidays, and the page view counter isn't showing unusual interest in a specific post. Is the extra traffic coming from Google? Is it related to a previous concern with the page view counter? I would like to think that masses of readers have discovered this web site. I don't.

Anyway, yes, I came into town to work on Labor Day. My day of rest is Saturday. Many people in my part of the world observe a day of rest on Sunday. It seemed more public-spirited to flout neighbors' tradition of resting on Labor Day than to flout their tradition of resting on Sunday. And I'm glad I did that, despite having first planned to work on Sunday in order to get a hack writing job mailed out earlier. Here's why...

Last week I was sick. Again. Not too sick to work, but sick enough to think serious thoughts about how long I can survive these repeated rounds of glyphosate poisoning and how much more compensation I've received for participating in medical experiments that were so much safer. (I never did drug tests. I did market studies, comprehension tests, exercise-related tests...and for those harmless things I got cash.) For three days in a row we had intense thunderstorms, heavy rain that carved out little stream beds in gravel roads and beside paved roads.

On Saturday I stayed in, used much less caffeine than I'd used to stay awake in the cafe, and took lots of naps. In the office room I sit on a bench that's long enough to work as a lumpy, crowded bed if I stretch out on it, bracing my head and feet on working document protected by a sheet, and I think I spent more time stretched out in front of the computer than sitting up and working with it.

But on Sunday I felt almost normal, or anyway a great deal better than I'd been feeling. I used the bathroom at normal intervals for normal purposes, rather than bolting to it to gush blood. Medium-size pants fit. I had enough energy to get some long-neglected housework done at last. I did the only laundry I've done, apart from running long-stored knits through a quick dryer cycle to get the yucky storage-bin smell off, during the month of August.) I burned about half of August's trash. I played outdoors with the kittens.

On Monday I woke up with another sneeze-seizure, and what came to mind was "God save the mark, if some thrice-cursed fool isn't out somewhere poisoning some other pretty flowers, every one of which is worth a hundred of him to this world. Already. God spare us all--if we as a species are worth saving." And although the wind shifted quickly, it's been that sort of day.

If I had to lose a day of the weekend indoors, I'm glad it wasn't Sunday, my one day of blessed relief.

Anyway I walked all three miles along Route 23 to use the wi-fi service at McDonald's, and that was another Experience, all by itself. I've been walking the three miles along Route 23 that bypass downtown Gate City, from the shopping plaza to the exit where the private roads branch off, for forty years. I know what to expect: chicory and Queen Anne's Lace, lots of grasshoppers, and a few Tiger Swallowtails and flies helping take care of the inevitable roadkill.

Never before, in August, have I seen what I saw today. The poisoners had been extra-thorough in the name of moving the lane markings so there's no safe place for motorists to pull over in case of car problems, this year. There is now half a car-width of pavement inside the left lane, where the unmown wildflowers have long been crowded out by glyphosate-proof crabgrass, and another half a car-width outside the right lane, where even the crabgrass has a...sandblasted look. What's sprouting in this new desert appears to be baby Spanish Needles, which are in the Bidens family and start out as little round clumps of little round leaves. The total defoliation of grass and clover, daisies and chicory, has enabled no real change to the roadsides beyond expanding the space in which plants tall enough to interfere with drivers' visibility could potentially sprout, and reducing the space in which a single-car accident could be prevented from becoming a pile-up.

And how the rain has carved...mercy, the shoulders of Route 23, which have always been exemplary in Scott County, look like the "too cheap to pay highway patrolmen, just maintain lethal road conditions to keep the prisoners inside the prison" effects for which Lee County's stretch of Route 23 is infamous. I saw pits six inches or a foot deep, about a shoe's breadth or a car tire's breadth wide, right against and under the pavement, ready to form bone-jarring, tire-smashing potholes right underneath the shiny new pavement.

But neither of those was the most alarming feature of this Brave New Road. It was the roadkill. Not the usual mangled deer and possums, although I saw one deer skeleton and two flattened possums. It was the water creatures. With no vegetation to hide them, they really showed up. One little water snake (there were three snakes) looked as if some vindictive person had tied a knot in its body, and some of the turtles had been so badly crushed I couldn't even count the shells, but the frogs hadn't been crushed at all. They had dried out where they died, in the weekend's heat wave. There were at least a dozen frogs. There were crayfish carcasses, too, and a raccoon, and several uncrushed insects. Their habitat in the ditches had been flooded, but they could have scrambled away from the water, as they and their ancestors have always done before, if whatever browned-out even the first crop of Spanish Needles hadn't poisoned the water.

Daaang, people...and I remind you that dang is a phonetic spelling of the Cajun French word for "crazy"! People in Kingsport drink that water. What have they done to you?

That's all I have time to type...back in the morning...