The Call of the Water Pig

During the February  we spent on   Hydra  pretending to be writers,  all we heard   at night were    donkey calls  and a beeping like the  warning  from a radio tower;  but there WAS no radio tower …  the island wasn't even electrified back then. 
 We told ourselves the beeping was the call of the Water Pig: a creature named by either Eric or John, which was   the nexus or Plexis, or mascot, or totem animal of the shared intestinal affliction we   called"Water Pig Fever".

    Morning light on Hydra came with  soft voices,  more donkeys,  roosters crowing and Maria's  "Ta Paraneo Ena Etimo," echoing up the stair well.  Her husband, Jimmy the Egyptian, had purchased Maria from  her family after a year long tour of the islands,  looking over fishermen's widows, which  were plentiful and inexpensive.   Jimmy  had tried and failed to teach Maria " Breakfast is Ready " in English, so instead he taught us the Greek       Jimmy - short, broad, and sixtyish, was a Matre'D  at   two harbor-front restaurants during the tourist season.  His English was very  good, and he spoke all major tourist languages.  He confided to us that he had worked for the C.I.A. during WW2.
            There were only the three chairs and Jimmy's steamer trunk there in the front room where we took breakfast.  Maria …  maybe thirty five years old … grave, silent, and beautiful,  brought out a single burner  stove that was little more than a Bunsen Burner on the flooor. She boiled Greek coffee  in a little pot, served thick as gruels , then she took the stove and retired to the back room. 
 We ate  the coffee with spoons, using  Jimmy's  trunk for a table.
    Afterwards he clapped his hands, and Maria emerged to clear the dishes away so Jimmy could open the trunk from which, over the course of several days, he produced clippings and a few novels in which he was mentioned.     While on Hydra would see few other local women  other than Maria, but Jimmy told us he could arrange for the four of us to have a party with some young women from another island, for money of course, but we did't take him up on it, and anyway I would not be untrue to Maria.
      
           It was  too cold for pretending to write in our unheated room, so  after breakfast we went to the harbor front;  John  toting his typewriter.
    We sat  at tables  in the sun,  but if an elbow was overtaken by the shade,  the arm knew it and one moved the chair a notch. We drank the instant Nescafe which was favored at the cafes (I longing for Maria's wine dark gurel) and we ate  the Biff Stake, which I am pretty sure was  the thrice cooked mutton kept on display in the store windows.
   In this way time passed and was marked.  Not much writing got done at the waterfront, but the typewriter made friends.
             A "lawyer" from Atlanta    decompressing on his way back home from  Viet Nam …"Veit WHAT? "which he   had left because lately everyone there was carrying a gun.     
  Fred, an ex G.I. gone bohemian after Service in peace time Germany, now renting a village house cheap, sleeping in a arched nook  in the wall ( intended I suspect as an alter for the icons ) and writing  experimental poems, which he sprinkled with various spices and food products , then baked in a slow oven.  Fred and George the Cop and Bob George the lawyer posed with us for the street photographer, who didn't have much work then.   Fred pointed out the Great Novelist X, with half a dozen people bubbling around him .
      Somewhere along there a certain  Russian Dancer   happened  along, but she made no impression on me …   attached to Maria as I was. 
 
    
    We spent an evening in a taverna where we actually danced with fishermen,  like in Zorba the Greek …. although the movie hadn't been made yet … holding onto their hankerchiefs.
   One old man,  after not dancing at all but drinking a lot,  crawled across the floor in front of the bar (where the keeper couldn't see him ) and all the way  down to the wine casks in the back of the room,  where he opened a spout and lay mouth agape under it until the tavern keeper  shut it off and dragged him out, to crawl home
    Maybe it was there then or another night, but somewhere John met the Russian Dancer who I never heard about when we were on the island, but whose existence   casts some doubt on his story to us about how he had been invited by one of the dancing fishermen   to go out squid spearing by lantern light. 

     
The steel blue  sea was  still too cold for swimming, but the rocks along the shore beyond the harbor were warm  on the surface.  
   While John was off "spearing squid" somewhere, one day , or several days,   Eric and I  walked out along and out of the harbor,  around the  point to take off our shirts and stretch out on the rocks .

       I rose up on my elbows the day I remember when I heard the outboard motor of a small  boat puttering along a fifty  yards or less off shore.
     A man in a suit was at the stern, hand on the controls,  while a white haired man in  f  whites stood at the bow scanning over the waves, like  the Captain of all he surveyed. 
      Surveying  us …then using dramatic gestures understandable at a great distance, the Captain  directed his stern man to steer the boat to shore.

      Without introductions or mention of any particular destination,  The Captain directed  us  to ride along.  
   We were boys, we were good sports,  and we climbed aboard.

      First stop was at a   near-shore island about the size of a house,  with a small white-washed chapel on top of it.  I read that there a lot of these on small islands off Greek shores: memorials to fishermen lost at sea.  Disembarked, the Captain pried a limpet off the shore rocks and ate it out of the shell with his front teeth, and told us to do the same.  Fruit of the Sea, he said.
     He told us he had come here, to light a candle and pray for his dead mother.
        We followed him up the the chapel, but   the door to the chapel was locked.  
         The Captian directed us to pick up a nearby log and batter the door in.  We did what we were told.  He was  crazy, but he was the captain.  My  apologies to all the dead fishermen and their widows.      

      The Captain lit a candle.   We lurked  uneasily outside while he prayed loud and long for his mother and also sang a few songs for his mother.
     After a while, the Captain led us back down the rocks to where the stern man waited, holding the boat off the rocks.
      Next stop was another village, smaller and more stretched out  than Hydra.  We stopped and tied up at a long dock extending from a house with a lot of grape arbor shade out front. There was as party going on.
       A wedding party.  The stern man stayed with the boat.  The Captain led us to the gathering, sat us down, and brought a serving girl to uswith her tray of many different olives.
  Then he grabbed the bride - still in her wedding dress -  and danced her around some.  
      A fellow in jodpurs appeard, carrying a shotgun which he left leaning against a wall.  He was returning from a short bird hunt and I think we learned that he was the groom, which may be some kind of tradition.
    Whoever the hunter was,  our fun loving guide picked up the shotgun and fired it through the arbor overhead.  This may be fairly common behavior in the more eastern mediteranian countries, but the other wedding guests soon disarmed him, and  our boatman suddenly appeared.   All insisted that the Captain   needed to leave.
       He refused to get back in the  boat, but proposed we walk back to Hydra harbor while the boatman returned along shore with the boat.    Eric chose toride back in the boat, but I agreed to walk with the Captain,  more so as not to offend him than out of a thirst for any more   adventure.
       It was a  long, winding walk  just about dinner time all over the island.  The Captain stopped us at several kitchen doors,  introduced me to the family sitting inside, then lifted food off the  grill and handed it to me.

    Finally, at the harbor front,   the Captian ducked  into a trinket shop,  and just as quickly  reappeared with a silver colored skull ring which handed to me . 
      Then he asked me to marry him.

   I turned him down, but he insisted that I keep the trinket.
       I had that thing for years, but then misplaced or lost it, and since I lost it,  I can no longer remember what it  really was ,  as if out of mind was out of being … so I had to make up the skull detail.
     I saw the  Captain once more.
       As we were about to board the boat leaving Hydra.      
        He came riding along the harbor on the back of a donkey that he seriously outweighed, surrounded and persued by  a dozen or so kids.  Had he known we were leaving.
         Stopping where we waited to go up the ramp, he reached into his lumpily bulging shirt, and pulled out an orange, which he handed to me.  I don't recall if Eric or John got one too. 
       While in Athens waiting for a train, we met someone who recognized the old man from our descriptions.
        The Captain WAS a captain: a retired sea captain  who lived half the time there in Hydra , and half the time at his apartment in Athens where he would go to the taverns evenings with a wheel barrow,  so that someone he met there could wheel him home when he was drunk, often staying on for a few days or weeks.  He had several people living in the apartment at a time.  Sometimes they would wheelbarrow him TO the taverna.
     The half the time that he spent on Hydra, the Captain lived with his mother, who  was NOT dead, though she must have been old as as the olive trees.  The steersman in the suit was his lawyer. 

   In Spring ofthe year  before we were there, the Americans or the French were filming  the blessing of the boats scene from the movie Phaedra,  in which the bishop throws a cross into the harbor and the  Hydra village boys dive into the harbor to recover it, as the tradition there.  The Captian  was there, and he too dove, or jumped in.  He had to be rescued.   I am not sure he would even float.  Not a glorious way for a Captain to  die at sea

    I have never been back, and I am sure Hydra is no longer the place it was, but  I have  recently learned that the mysterious beeping on Hydra, assuredly not a radio tower,  was and is actually the call of the Scops Owl.  

magicus

www.owlpages.com

     The important thing about the Scops, is that i  hasn't always been an Owl .
   The Scops USED to be one of two   sons of a fisherman who was lost at sea …  leaving the older brother in charge of the family sheep and the younger   in charge of the horses.  I am not inventing this.
  One day there was an especially dangerous and frightening thunderstorm, such may have drowned their father at sea, so the younger boy herded the horses  back home.
       But the older brother, counting the horses  as they came in and coming up one short,   sent the  younger brother  racing back through the storm to get the missing horse.
   While searching for the horse, the younger brother was struck by lightning and killed.

   Only when the horse came back without the younger brother,  did the older  realized that he had forgotten  to count that one - the horse his brother had been riding … and that, as a result, the young one had died.  Let that be a lesson to me, and to anyone who can figure out its relevance to the story here.  Anyway, I am not inventing it.
   
         Long ago, and long since my month on Hydra, an underwater cable was  laid from shore to Hydra.  This I know, because Googling tells me so.  Googling also reveals that the name of the island Hydra  (from the root word meaning "water",   originally referred to the springs that made the island habitable … until the earth quaked a few centuries ago, the rocks fractured, and the normal chanels and cisterns dried up.   Much of the water comes by taknker now days , and they write that a deasalinization plant is going to happen.
        But stop the story  here,  go back , dig a little deeper in the Net,  and  you will see that THE Hydra  you are more likely to know about even if you have never heard of the island, is the many headed monster which guards the Underworld.    THE WATER PIG,  you might say, and I DO say.
       You can enter the Underworld either when you slay the critter, or when it slays you.  Easy enough to get IN by  the cheap trick of dying, but you don't get in alive or get out at all, unless you  cut off every one of its piggy heads.  This Hercules and every boy and artist must do, AFTER shoveling out the stables, and a few other things.
    For an artist or a curious young person, the Underworld WOULD be a fascinating place to visit … if you knew you could get back out.     And Hydra  the island, at the gates of hell or not,  would be a paradise to live and stay on if  you only  have  a donkey, a garden, and a well.   
      I know my Hydra/Hydra conflation is  naked ambiguation  …  but ALL things are related,  if you just do the hard work of relating them, as I have here, or better..
  Did the young Irving (whom Eric reminds me we used to call "Old Irving")   visit the Underworld when he was unconscious those three days.?  Did young Old Irving slay the piggy headed monster?    Well, I wouldn't go to far with that kind of myth making.  
        All I know is that  he came out of his coma raring to go  Russian dancing and "squid spearing,"  that he never  said anything to me about a visit to the underworld,  and also, that he never did submit the story he had promised to the student magazine … where as Eric did; so did I,  and this was it  again, with improvements and corrections ... but I didn't consciously make any of it up except as noted.     
    


 

Water Pig Fever

   Aboard the  old Orient Express  on the way from Vienna to   Istambul in nineteen sixty three,  Eric Ross,  John Irving, and I had eaten nothing but Semmel rolls and cheese  for three days.  So, as we were nearing Istambul,   we went to the dining car  for  one regular meal before the trip was over.    
   By the time we finished eating that fateful meal, the train was in the station,  we hadn't been given a bill, and the waiter was nowhere to be seen.
          We went back to the compartment for our baggage, and we got off the train. 
   But as we were dealing with a kid who hooked for a student hotel,  the waiter   ran up and made us pay.
     I don't remember that we added a tip, and I doubt it, but we were going to pay for  that meal  the rest of our lives; my next payment being made that night, simultaniously into a toilet and the bathtub  of that student hotel.

   No doubt but that meal  was the source of  what we might well have called the "Orient Express", and  we three later referred to as " Water Pig Fever".      Dr. Rudolf Faulkner, the Russian doctor of internal medicine I visited in Vienna, said    it was a rare form of disentery  -    but   in my case (he advised me) was as much a metaphysical as a physicial affliction.     By my nature, said the doctor, I had the disease of a philosphic mind:  a mind unable to turn away from the emptiness at the heart of being.
   Those, or something like them, may have been the words of the Russian writer Ospenski, whose "Fragments of an Unknown Teaching"  Doctor Faulkner prescribed for me to read.  I may get around to that someday.
  Anyway, it was convieniently enough, pretty much what I had come to Vienna to study and would encounter there in the form of Sartre's La Nausea, and Victor Frankl's popular and positive version of Existentialism, none of which you need to read.
   
   I avoid philosophical abstraction now days,  my insides are healthy, and I have tediously trained myself to at least imagine pattern  and meaning  between me and the famous black hole at the heart of being,   but I'll never totally rid myself of Water Pig Fever.
    I may not even WANT  to be totally  free of it, if only for the reason  that, without the continuing story of misadventure and suffering,  I might not remember much of my  past life at all.
  And here is great and valuable pleasure in remembering … even  in remembering the painful and wrenching past,  which you can always remember  differently  and in better humor than we actually experienced it. there is great pleasure and education in remembering togehter, as we differ in such novel ways  in our memories and experiences of the same event.
            According to Irving, I was the only one who spent the night using the bathtub and the toilet simultaneouslhy … and that does make sense… seeing as there was only one of each, and three of us..
      
      We each came down with our own version of the Water Pig Fever.
      Irving's own  crisis came   after we had taken the boat to Greece, and a ferry from the port of Piraeus to the Island Hydra  where, for a month, we would pretend to be writers.
    Irving was better at the writing act and had brought along his portable typewriter, which he lugged to the harbour front cafe each day,  but within a week he had his own long, drawn-out bout in the bathrorom,  after which he  lay in a coma for a couple of days, drooling into a pan beside the bed while we waited for the mayor of Hydra:   a doctor who traveled the islands seeing patients  on a three day rotation. 
   When he finally did arrive, the mayor told   us that John had Typhoid Fever, or maybe it was Typhus, ask him… anyway,  the Doctor said that if John had gone another day or two without the medicine, he would have died.  
   As for Eric, it might suffice to report that he had his rectum rebuilt a few years later, and is functioning well in Colorado.
    All three lived to tell the tale and I have been telling it over and over  for the last forty years.    I remember that month in Hydra so very well now, having  reinvisioned and told it so many times, and I am likely to tell it again here….   but I don't believe the other two guys about the events of that month, and I am not so sure about myself.
    Not a problem:  It is just marvelous what seperate worlds we inhabit, even when we are together and supposedly having the same experience.
           

A Note to our Readers

    There is a whole lot of stuff besides the stuffing that is necessary to make a book and I am darn sure going to have it all with the next book.
  Here is how I am coming along in the early stages. 
     As you can see, there is a lot of filling out to do before I get to the body of the monster.

 Nowella and Uncle Threadbear

         by Oren Pierce, B.A. , B.S., M.S.G
  
   About Oren Pierce.
               
  Oren Pierce is the pseudonym of  Youtube weatherman, Davey Weathercock, who is himself pseudonymous, and has not done any weather reporting since his partner  Olive the weather hen (who worked under her own name) died. 
  Mr. Weathercock now makes his life with a trunk full of stuffed animals, cats, chickens,    and other characters.      
     The head animal   -  his Significant Critter -  is a pale-furred, long-nosed bear not much larger than a chicken. 
Mr. Weathercoock  calls his bear  Nowella, and thinks it is important for him to tell her life story,  including all about her confused, wide-world wanderings,  starting even  before the beginning. 
   We may not hang around for all of that ourselves,   but let's just hope Mr. Weathercock is  at least entertaining  enough  that you will not stand up right away to go eat Tuna Noodle Cassarole at the refrigerator.

              Prologue

           Introduction

            How to use this book

                Because the Dog's Plot Book of Bears is spiral bound,  you will need no book marks, and can instead  leave this handy ,  lanky book  flopped open in your easy  chair , so   later you can return to reading,  exactly where you left off before your trip to the refrigerator … and no one will have taken your seat.
        Unless, in passing by, someone has been hooked in by an illustration and  has taken up the story where you left off.. 
            To prevent such   bookjacking,  you may take this book  to the kitchen with you and leave it   open on the counter, just as you would flop or prop a typical spiral bound cook book, while you  make, or in this case eat the   tuna noodle casserole.   
        In light of that flexibility, we have included among the Bonus features, a  recipe for hand made tuna noodle casserole,  as well as one called  " Chicken Soup for Chickens,"  and  instructions for several non-filling, meatless  main dishes that can be offered to  stuffed animals. 
                 Note:
                   Please close the refrigerator door while you are reading/eating.  Warning :  these pages are not waterproof or sink-washable and these comments are in no way intended to   endorse or encourage eating while reading.

   Footnotes
                 Most irrelevant detail and distracting information has been relegated to foot notes, where you may read it after the chapter is over, or after the book, or not at all.  It is recommended that you race right through the story in one run, in order to get the  whole world view.  It is NOT recommended that  you take this book to, or keep it in the bathroom.

         
          Epiogue

     Afterword

Triumph of the Pears

   Pumpkin Hill  overlooks Cayuga Lake  at the widest point,  and the  lake  reflects an extra dose of sun …. along with a lot of wind … so the  thin, hill-top soil is parched in summer. 
  The Cayuga  Indians probably never tried to plant up here,  preferring the lower, gentler slopes where the soil is thicker, the growing season longer, and water close at hand.

   The  Pumpkin Hill  section was awarded   to one of Washington's generals and was sold on down to a  family from Connecticuit : the Morgans, who traveled  up here by oxcart, possibly unaware until they cleared the land,  of just how thin the  glacier-scraped hill-top soil was. 

      The clearing method that most white settlers used was roughly the same as Sullivan's men used to destroy the Indian orchards around the village below……which itself was was not all that different from the method the Indians had used to prepare a wooded area  for a  ten year planting cycle before leaving it to the deer and berries :  Slash and burn.
     But  the   clearing methods of the white settlers  were the most destructive and didn't include moving on every  ten years to  let the soil come back. 

 In the first year the homesteaders typically  girdled the trees to kill them and let in the light.
        When the trees were dead and dry, some would be hewn for barn and house building, but most would be burnt to charcoal.  
    No doubt some charcoal was reserved for the local forges and   kilns, but the majority was burnt and reduced even further….into  potash, which they shipped down lake and canal along the line of migration to older homesteads that , five or ten years earlier in the history of expansion,  had   burnt  and sold off their own biomass to yet older settlements. 




 

 The  Morgan family traveled by Oxcart from Conneticuit to Pumpkin Hill,   probably without having seen the soil they were betting on.  
  In the early years,  after rolling the stones off the fields and onto their foundations,   the Morgans plowed the ground and planted wheat. 
    But the plowed    fields became like broken pottery in the hot Summers, and the soil got  thinner with each season….even with the addition of potash imported from newer homesteads up the route of migration. 



    
   The farm didn't prosper long.    The Morgan boys  one by one moved on down into Aurora, started the masons, and got into politics.  In the eighteen twenties,  the Morgan son who had become a Senator  sold the homestead on down to others   who tried poor-soil crops like potatoes, and then  beans, then table grapes.  

   The last owner of the intact farm planted many acres of    Red Pines that he planned to sell as Christmas trees to send his kids to college.
     In the nineteen seventies, the original house of the  homestead burnt down.

      The plantation pines are now ship-mast size.  
    Much  of the old cleaerd land is hay meadow or cattle range, much second-growth timber.  Most of the hill top and West slope is public hunting land that has not been mowed in many years, and which the state stocks  with pen-raised pheasants  …  which the Coyotes eat most of.   Coyotes, Deer and Turkeys  thrive.
   The four acre remnant of the homestead  where the old home was and Dog's Plot now is,  has  been mowed  only with paths, aisles, and small clearings for the last fifteen or twenty years.    Honeysuckle, Dogwoods, Wild Roses and Brambles are well established.  Buckthorns have  come up, grown old  and died.
 
      In the meantime,   the stumps of the Cayuga  village Pear victims of General Sullivan had  long ago  sent roots traveling  and sprouting;  the sprouts had become trees that flowered and set seed,     climbing the slopes through generations and evolving a local variety with root systems suited to the thin clay of the glacier-scraped lake basin.   Over the same period,  the fruits themselves reverted to  round and smaller forms, like the ancestral pears of the Caucus mountains  before  European and Asian Pears went their separate ways.   
  


      When I first moved here,  I busted through the hardpan clay, added soil, and planted a couple of dozen fruit trees, including Pears, which my research showed would be most tolerant of the clay, the poor drainage, and the periods of dehydration we have up here.
    I hardly noticed the naturalized Pear trees that spire up through the invasive Buckthorns of Dog's Plot, beating the Ash, Hickory, and Oak out of the woods, into the open … because the naturalized trees were thorny and the fruits     mostly small, round, green, bitter,  and hard to distinguish form some kind of crab apple.
   I went through a couple Summers pumping the  well dry  twice a day trying to get the new tree root systems established….before I realized that the "Crab Apples"  were actually Pears, and it occurred to me that  I could take advantage of the evolved and established Pears….by simply grafting cultivated varieties onto them.    So I did.



   I have been colonizing the Pears for five or six years now.  Or eight.

 
     
By next Spring anyway, I will have about a hundred and fifty  trees here grafted and growing a dozen varieties of European and Asian Pears…  some trees already twelve or sixteen feet tall, headed for the sky.  I prune out the center and spread the leading limbs.

 

    The late frosts of last Spring prevented fruiting  and left the trees to hyper-vegetate instead…which means they should fruit extra heavily next  Spring. 
   By  late summer….. if we don't have another double frost and hail disaster….or the lake doesn't rise six-hundred feet,    I should be overwhelmed with pears.
   I'll put some out by the road for you.
         Take a basket of them nd leave five bucks in the cash box. 
               Thanks.


                 

Sex, Trees, and the Single Parent

      The one Fig tree in  the Dog's Plot  orchard moves into the house each Winter with its   companion plant Aloe.  I occasionally harvest a few figs from the planter, but of course the Fig and the Aloe don't mate with one another….. and in fact,  Fig trees are peculiar in that each one has  sex only with itself:   the fruits develop from ingrown flowers that never open.  So,  to reproduce or recreate, the Fig tree "frigs" itself, if you will;  and you can't.
        The offspring  of a  figsexual union will be identical to the  bisexual, self-polinating parent:  a clone.
   But most  trees and people  are born of two parents, who together  had  four parents,  who had sixteen…. and so on.  As a result of having so many gene contributors, we may not even resemble either parent, but more like a mixture of the two and their general forebears, or random throwbacks to the originalbears,  including occasional freak characteristics,  creating totally newbears.

  Plant the seed of most any  Pear,  Apple, or other fruit tree…. and nobody knows what you'll get….maybe  even a genetic mutation which enables your  tree to produce apples  that looks like strawberries and  taste like bananas.     
    Yet  the seed of this tree will be just as unpredictable as that from any tree.  You will need a method other than sex to produce another Strawbannana  tree.




    Some trees can clone themselves through various forms of non-sexual reproduction.   Some, like Locust trees, send up sprouts from  traveling roots.  Apple trees will sometimes take root where bent branches touch the ground….especially if you  bury the elbow.   The resulting trees are called "Gypsies".   " Layering"  is what horticulturalists call the process  when done deliberately.  You could try  layering  your Strawbannana.

     Or…  you might  whittle a wedge on one end of a Strawbannana Apple twig, and stick it into a split Apple sapling stump, hoping for the twig and root-stock to fuse……..which may well happen if   you line up the green growing layers,  if you seal the exposed parts, if the critters don't get to it, and if a few more ifs.  "Cleft Grafting",  we call it.


  

   Romans developed grafting……. or maybe they stole it from the Greeks …. and  perpetuated dozens of Pear mutations by grafting.
    Then, through the dark ages after the fall of the Roman Empire, this practice was carried on  behind cloister walls by the churchmen of Rome.  And now there may be some thought in the Vatican along the lines reproducing  priests by similar means.  Heaven knows,  medical grafters can already  attach a severed finger to the middle of your forehead.

   Be that as it may, during the sixteen hundreds   fruit varieties traveled  as grafted root stock  and rooted cuttings, through the Christian empire  into the Americas.
    French Jesuit missionaries  branching down from Canada  brought their own varieties of Apples, Cherries, Peaches, and Pears to their missions on Cayuga lake and to the Cayuga Village downhill from us at Dog's Plot.
  A hundred years on, when the Cayugas were living in European-style, stick- framed houses,    growing all these foreign fruit varieties, and maybe even  broccoli,  at peace with the English who were at war with the colonists …Washington's men marched through here, burned the village, destroyed the field crops, and cut down the orchards.
   That was the end of  those  Sweet Cherries and Peaches.
        But Apples and Pears - Pears, in particular - sprout well from stumps.
    

The Hands

 
     This my great, great grandfather Charles Drury,  with his wife -  my great great grandmother,  her daughter in law  - my great grandmother, and my grandmother - the baby, Vera Drury,  photographed by  my great grandfather - Dr. Charles Drury of Natural Bridge.
     Somewhere there is another photo of the great great old man  seated in front of his family, in the Boston rocker which you see sitting empty on the right side of this photo;  his hands   closest of all family members to the camera, appearing huge,  gripping his knees like gnarling cedar roots on rock,  looking  as if they, THE HANDS themselves, were largely responsible for sending his three sons to medical school,  freeing the old fellow to  travel organizing farm granges, to farm out his cows, to become a bee keeper, and rock in the chair, growing the long white beard.

     When the old man was gone, the   Boston Rocker  went to the Dr. Drury home in Natural Bridge,  where  I lived as a child.
 When we moved to Ithaca in 1949, we brought the chair along.
   In transit, or  maybe in rocking horse use at Edgewood Place, the chair got broken enough that it was stowed in the basement to await repairs. 
        We also kept our firewood  in the basement.
          One day my brother went down cellar for kindling and , finding none but seeing  the busted chair, he split himself an armload, and  emerged  with it from the cellar: to the mortification of our mother at the stove.
   That was the only time I ever saw Mama Dot cry.

    We kept the chair, a bundle of nineteen pieces in the cellar, for fifty years or so.
  In the nineteen nineties, my niece Liz Sticker who was then a carpenter for my Natural Bone Builders, rebuilt  the chair, and my daughter Mnetha has painted it a couple of times since.  Liz has it now.  Maybe she has the hands photo too.  I won't need it though:  I'm  actually getting the  hands.

These Trees

  

     It was a Godawful year for fruits on this hill: with early heat, then late frosts,  hail later on,  followed by a long summer  drought... all perfectly ordered as if by a  Godman Bully.

   The Cherries straightened up after the heavy snow, but few flowers and fruits made it through the
hail.     My best Plum flowered so heavily it looked like it was still covered with snow...but then  brown knots of fungus   swelled  all over the branches, so I had to cut the tree back to little more than a coat rack.  

    When you add to that a wayward  raccoon and wayward mink that  wiped out all but one of my chicken flock,   I might be tempted to just raise mice and cats.
      But my Pear orchard here at Dog's Plot is going to be all right.
 Very few pears this year, and  trees here  lost most of their fuit, but the trees themselves are going to flourish.
Pears originated in the extreme conditions of mountain Asia,  and ever since the French Jesuit Missionaries brought them here..... a couple hundred year before White settlement.....  have been evolving and adapting to the local clay .  

  


      The Jesuits  had been in Canada ever since well before the Mayflower pilgrims  showed up on the East coast..and they  also had fingers into Iroquois country  south of  Lake Ontario,  including two missions at native settlements on Cayuga Lake.   And where the Jesuits went, they took their gardens with them.

     The village now aappropriately called  Aurora is in a deep valley with a ridge to the east
that makes the morning last hours  longer than if you live up here on the hill where the sky is big,
the geese scrape by just overhead,  and the West wind blows the pumpkins around. The village was known as Deawendote, or Village of the Constant Dawn before the Jesuits arrived, later as Chonodote (which maybe somebody can tell me the meaning of) and then called  Peachtown by the soldiers who chopped down the orchards there.   In the mild climate at lake level the Cayugas planted   not only their own  three sister vegetables,   but also French vegetables and trees.     For all we know, the Cayuga  may have been growing Broccoli and Arugula here. 
     But it IS known that the Jesuits brought Peaches, Cherries, Apples and Pears to Deawendote, which around then became known as Chonodote,     
     
         After two hundred years of   constant-dawn and advancing garden culture,  the Cayugas, who were by then living in wood frame houses like the French and English,   chose the loyalist side in our war between the Anglos;   so  General Sullivan's troops, ordered by Washington, and led by William Butler, marched up and down along the Finger Lakes, slashing and burning Iroquois villages.

   
    There were no  Broccoli survivors at Chonodote, nor did most of those non native fruit trees persist,  but the Pears are all around us. 
   If you cut down a pear tree, it will sprout dozens of little clone Pear trees from
the stump .   Quick-growing, short-lived brush and perenials   come up first on brunt and abandoned land, but Pears have plenty of time,  rise like church spires and then spread white flower crowns.....flowering and fruiting year after year, the seedlings  creeping up the slopes.

    Even in regularly mowed hayfields,  gnarly  old gnome pears, kept to four or six inches tall, but with deep root systems,  are ready to take over when we give up mowing.  Pears can live for hundreds of years.  Pears can wait.
  
      Dog's Plot had not been mowed for five or ten years before I arrived.   For the first few years, I planted fruit trees  and didn't even notice the  pears, or if I did, thought they were crab apples.  The naturalalized Pears devolve from the cultivated varieties and tend to be small, round, and even bitter. 
           But in the last few years I have transformed most of  them with grafting.