“We Want Tick Shots! We Want Tick Shots!”

Mine is no scientific hypothesis. I’m not a scientist. Maybe it’s nothing but a hare-brained notion? Bear with me. (Or don’t.)

Start with what seems to be a rising incidence of Alzheimer and Alzheimer-like dementia in the U.S. Add the fact that ticks are at work enlarging their continental territory. Now turn to an article on ticks and tick-borne diseases in the July 2018 issue of Consumer Reports, where we see that symptoms of Lyme disease can include mental confusion and memory problems. 

“Most of the time,” the article notes, “Lyme symptoms resolve after a short course of antibiotics.” 

Often, however, the tick victim is unaware of the bite — or perhaps aware of being bitten, but then no rash appears — and in either case, Lyme disease may occur but not be diagnosed, let alone treated. 

Now you see where I’m going with this. 

The article concludes with the terrifying statement that “we still haven’t even begun to grasp the extent of the [tick[ problem” (given that the tick’s ability to spread allergy has only recently been discovered). Far-from-simple-or-inexpensive measures may offer hope in the future by reducing deer and mouse populations, editing tick genes, etc. What made me exclaim out loud in disbelief and frustration, however, was this parenthetical (can you believe it?) paragraph: 

(A previous vaccine was discontinued because of a lack of demand and reports of side effects such as arthritis, though research showed that arthritis wasn’t in fact more common in people who had been vaccinated.) 

Did you read that paragraph carefully? You might, possibly, have developed arthritis after having had this vaccine, but you would have been just as likely to develop arthritis without the vaccine! Was it reports of arthritis that led to “lack of demand” (as specious claims linking autism to childhood immunizations kicked off a wave of childhood vaccination-avoidance among impressionable parents), or did the Lyme vaccine simply come out before the spread of disease-bearing ticks (and accompanying tick anxiety) reached levels high enough to generate demand? Because I ask you, who would not want a vaccine against Lyme disease?

I realize I’ve strayed from my original idea about a possible connection between ticks and dementia. Forgive me. Tick-phobia makes me a little crazy here in the “Upper Midwest,” one of the regions noted for spreading tick-borne diseases. But can we start a movement now? 

“We want tick shots! We want tick shots!” 

Let me through, please, to the head of the line!

South to Whitewater

Return to the West, VI: South to Whitewater 

When I consult the United States road atlas and see what a relatively small area, even of Arizona, is occupied by Cochise County, down in the southeast corner of the state, it astounds me to recall how much we found to explore within its boundaries. Our home base territory was basically Sulphur Springs Valley, extending south from the Dos Cabezas range between the Chiricahua Mountains to the east and the Dragoons to the west.

(On the other side of the Dragoons is the San Pedro Valley. Everywhere in Arizona, mountain ranges are the general landmarks by which one orients oneself in space, with specific formations and peaks serving to fine-tune location.)

We had reason early in our three-month stay to explore to the south, because every spring sandhill cranes fly north over the continent to Canada to nest and raise young, and in recent years a few pairs of the stately birds have begun spending their summers in Leelanau County, where we had learned to look for them each year. Now people told us that in Cochise County, Arizona, we might see as many as ten thousand at a time, down in the Whitewater Draw. If a thousand cranes mean good luck, what must ten thousand cranes portend?

“Where would you like to go first?”

“Could we go to Whitewater?”

Our most direct route was to backtrack halfway to Willcox from Dos Cabezas and take the Kansas Settlement Road south to Hwy 191.

Straight as a string, with a kink or a knot here and there, the Kansas Settlement Road drops south through the Sulphur Springs Valley, full of mystery and surprises. For instance, we drove by many times before realizing there was a parking area giving access to the Willcox Playa from the south. More obvious, with its big painted sign out front announcing the business, was the Kansas Settlement Gin Company, but we never saw any sign of activity around the buildings. Bonita Bean was a different story. (A kink in the road goes around the bean company.) Monsieur Jean, our neighbor, was one of many who bought his pinto beans in bulk down on the Kansas Settlement Road.

A recent modern development -- I know it to be recent and modern because an old-timer at the regional museum shook her head over such goings-on -- is an enormous dairy farm on the Kansas Settlement Road. To feed dairy cows and supplement grazing for beef cattle, huge green fields irrigated by irrigation systems line the road, looking almost like urban electric towers and lines. Sun makes rainbows in sprayed water, and wind blows a fine mist through the air, and it is beautiful – but painful, too, to think of sun and wind evaporating so much water, pumped from deep underground, before it does any growing thing any good at all.

While we were in residence in Dos Cabezas, results of a well survey were reported in the weekly newspaper, with figures for present water depth compared to that ten years previously. In Willcox, wells had typically lost less than five feet. Most alarming and dramatic losses were, not surprisingly, along the Kansas Settlement Road, where many wells had lost fifty, some as much as sixty feet, heavy losses attributed to “groundwater overdraft,” i.e., pumping too much water out of the ground. (To the north, between Willcox and Bonita, also heavily irrigated land, losses were reported between 30 and forty feet.) Besides cattle in the one large confinement operation (CFO), plantations of nut trees, also heavy drinkers, may be seen along the Kansas Settlement Road.

Another stretch of road indicated the presence of small residential holdings. Private road signs at regular intervals announced roads with Western names, such as Mule Deer Road, obviously intended to appeal to snowbird winter home-buyers. The name I liked best, though, wasn’t for a road but for geological landmarks named on our map of the valley as the Three Sisters. I always smiled to see the Three Sisters appear along our road south.

Somewhere along the way – was it on the Kansas Settlement Road or beyond it, where we had already joined the highway? – a little gas station and convenience store appeared at the side of the road, announcing

Coffee

food

PASTRIES

out in the very middle of nowhere. I can’t speak for the “pastries” (my skepticism always kicks in when I see that word, which usually indicates the availability of fried donuts), but the store offered plenty of cowboy boots and hats and shirts.

And then we were sailing through empty land again.

To reach the Whitewater Draw, it is necessary to leave the main road and travel by washboard, but the slow-down is well worthwhile. It is also necessary, for the fullest viewing pleasure, to leave the parking lot and walk the path around various ponds. 

Yes, ponds! At least, that’s what they look like. I’m not sure what creates and holds the water in the Draw, but to my lake-starved Michigan eyes it seemed nothing short of a miracle. Beautiful water, the surface stirred by wind, edges soft with plant life and frogs and water birds of various kinds, all of it stretching out deep and wide, a tractor working far in the background and hazy mountains beyond the farmed land. (I tried not to see the irrigation framework.) It was transporting to be near so much water in southeast Arizona. That was the first miracle of the day.

Then came the second miracle. On that first visit we made to the Draw, the January wind was fierce, cutting through clothes and attempting nonstop to tear hats from heads and scarves from throats, and yet everyone in the relatively large crowd of human visitors was smiling as if at a choir of heavenly hosts. People were hunched over against the cold, holding onto their hats, clutching their coats to keep them closed, but beaming beatifically, faces upturned to the sky and glancing now and then at other passing humans to exchange thrilled smiles of amazement. Because there were, literally, thousands of sandhill cranes, soaring and circling and calling, coming gradually lower and lower until, a few at a time, they let themselves join us on earth..

Leaving the draw, dazed with visions, we continued toward Bisbee, a town David remembered from a visit over two decades before. The vegetation changed somewhat that close to la frontera, the border with Mexico. But I will leave memories of Bisbee for another post.

The cranes, the tens and thousands of cranes....

The Road to the Cow Town

Return to the West, III: The Road to the Cow Town

No matter where else a day might take us, how far afield, morning in southeast Arizona in early 2015 always led first from Dos Cabezas, our little ghost town hideaway, to Willcox, the cow town fourteen miles up Highway 186, often with a stop on the way, maybe five miles from the cabin, where we had good cell phone reception (lacking in the ghost town). The first trips felt long, but as time went by the distance grew ever shorter.

Moving or standing still, there was a lot to see along the way, and all of it, every square inch, entirely different from Michigan. One of the first things I taught myself was how to distinguish yucca from agave from sotol. Gradually we accumulated subtle landmarks invisible to us on the first few trips – certain striking plants; traces of an old railroad bed; a dry wash here or a dirt road there; a death memorial near a barbed wire fence; finally, most notably, the edge of the playa. If there were clouds in the sky, they never held their shapes or formations for long but could be seen for miles and explored visually, like the mountains. Regarding mountains, as navigator and reader of maps it was up to me to learn the names of the ranges in our larger neighborhood -- Chiricahuas, Dos Cabezas, Pinalenos, Dragoons -- and to keep us oriented according to where we were in relation to the different ranges, the way we keep oriented here at home in Michigan by our relationship to lakes.

In the Arizona landscape, basically open to the sky and far from lush with vegetation, my vision became more acute once acclimated. I developed the ability to discern detail and movement over long distances and was gradually able to see horses far away before lifting binoculars to my eyes to verify the sighting. Other presences and movements were more obvious: a pickup truck speeding along a dirt road would raise a cloud of dust visible for miles; large livestock gates across private roads, usually closed and locked, drew our eyes if swung open. Without knowing our neighbors, we watched them and knew they were watching us, too. People left each other alone, but there was no place to hide. We kept a lookout for the clean, bright white trucks driven by Border Patrol officers, and after only a few days one officer, recognizing our car, started waving to us each morning as we went by. That’s the little, casual, Western lift-of-an-index-finger wave, of course.

There were certain points along the road where we could often expect to see livestock grazing. If they were not there, we wondered who had been moving cows, and why? One morning it was clear that cows and calves had been separated for the first time, a significant day on the ranching calendar. Mothers were on one side of the fence, bawling babies on the other. How many square miles of dry, inhospitable scrub must be needed to raise a single animal? One modest home place was noteworthy for its stacks of hay bales, a sizable investment with hay running as high that year as $21 a bale.

Roadrunner! Always droll and delightful....

(Another time, returning from a day trip down to Douglas and Agua Prieta, Sonora, with a visiting friend, she and I saw mule deer running parallel to the road, followed shortly afterward by coyote.)

Then, approaching Willcox, the vast, empty playa opened out in mystery. Always so tantalizingly near and yet so impossibly far from the road, the playa simultaneously called to us and denied us access. Every time we passed we strained to see farther, more than once teased by what appeared to be water in the distance, the old lake reasserting its identity in modern time. Mirage? Much later, on another road, on the other side of the playa, we found a bird-viewing area that showed, yes, water on the other side, a modern remnant of lake. But that is another story.

A great, white, dry, ancient lakebed, the playa seemed to have its own weather systems. Clouds over the playa were different from clouds over surrounding land. Once or twice winds whipped up a dust storm, turning the playa into a Saharan hell and then carrying that hell out past the lakebed, across the roads and into the town of Willcox. When that happened, the clouds of airborne dust could be seen from fifty miles away on the expressway. The playa had other aspects of hell, too, having been used for bombing practice and still containing unexploded ordnance. And yet it held fascination for us that was never dispelled.

On the edge of Willcox, past a straggling line of deserted buildings, others with only questionable signs of occupancy, and the first outlying businesses of the town, a road off the highway promised both golf course and bird viewing area. Turn left, and along the right side of the side road was high, strong, serious fence topped with razor wire. Inside the fenced compound stood modern buildings, surrounded by extensive parking lots and many shiny white vehicles. This was the U.S. Border Patrol’s very physical presence. (They might be the town’s largest employer.) Farther down the same road, on the other side, smaller, more meanly fenced areas guarded dilapidated rusty trucks and trailers and campers until finally the road ended in a large, open, dusty loop around Willcox Lake, a local paradise for birds and birders.

Cattle grazed nearby, the Dos Cabezas peaks rose in the distance, and regularly on winter afternoons platoons of sandhill cranes came in to land and feed and rest and socialize. The number of birds was not as overwhelming as at the much larger Whitewater Draw to the south but impressive nonetheless. First came their calls. Impatiently scanning the sky, one for a long time saw nothing, then at last small, dark shapes. Very high in the sky. It seemed to take forever for the birds to appear as themselves, circling and calling and wheeling gradually lower and lower and lower until they finally landed. There were other birds, too, varieties of ducks and grebes, my (as I thought of him) loggerhead shrike, and once, thrillingly, a vermilion flycatcher.

But we did not usually stop to view birds on our way into town. That was for later.

Houses. Certain favorites among them each of us had, chosen for a porch or roof style or trees in the yard, but all were modest in the extreme. The railroad tracks. Feed store to the left, wine-tasting rooms in attractive small bungalows to the right, and on the other side of the tracks, the depot, the park, and the old buildings of the original downtown. Whether or not we had to wait for a train, reaching the railroad tracks and seeing Willcox on the other side always made me smile.

How Long Is a Day?

Return to the West, II: How Long Is a Day?

Information on times for sunrise and sunset are readily available for any intersection of latitude and longitude, for any day of the year, but clock times given don’t take into account trees, hills, mountains, or canyons. Here in Michigan, someone living deep in the woods, west of a high, wooded ridge will experience sunrise much later than a Lake Huron shoreline dweller. Dark comes earlier in the woods, too. The beginning and end of a Michigan day are gradual, anyway, even along the shores of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior, often with subtle, soft edges and muted tints.

Desert and mountain sunrises and sunsets are more tropical – at least, from what I’ve read of the tropics. They are not, except on the occasional cloudy morning or evening, long drawn-out affairs. The sky grows light before the sun itself appears, but once up that sun is anything but subtle. So, too, when it drops below the western horizon at day’s end, dark is a sudden presence. (Absence of light = presence of dark.)

On this spring Sunday in northern Michigan, with cold, grey skies promising a gloomy day, precipitation probable, I remember very different mornings, those of our ghost town cabin in the high desert. In Dos Cabezas, if I woke when the sky was still dark, the lights of distant houses and ranches winked against the blackness, as they had the evening before. Slowly, then, gradually, unrelieved blackness would give way to indistinct, shadowy hills. At first the mountains were more suspicion than reality, themselves untrustworthy, but when at last the sun set fire to the mountain horizon the light would be instantly implacable, flat and white and pitiless, and the reality of the mountains revealed – falsely, of course, as we know from geology lessons -- as immutable.

After a night cold enough to make gas heat welcome in the cabin, morning remained cool enough that I habitually wore a heavy, rough suede jacket lined with wool fleece for the day’s initial sortie, a walk with my dog down into the dry wash. The Philadelphia Wash, one of the neighbors called it. Like rivers and creeks in Michigan, the washes in Arizona have names, though it is generally only the locals who know them. In summer storms dangerous torrents of water from the mountains rush through: in winter only patterns in the sand show where water sometimes flows. The wash was easier walking than the desert itself, because beyond the wash one must thread carefully through mesquite and catclaw (jacket and boots necessary protection), and the ground throughout our part of Dos Cabezas was littered with strands and pieces of rusty barbed wire, rusty old tin cans, and all kinds of broken glass, remnants of an old dump as well as the ghost town itself, with wire fences strung to keep cows out of various parcels of property.

Down in the dry wash, in midwinter, where frost inhabited shaded areas until they were reached by sunlight, morning’s bird was the pyruloxxia, Arizona’s “silver cardinal,” singing from bare branches of leafless winter scrub oaks. The color palette of the winter high desert was limited to dusty browns and greys and grey-greens, relieved only by the bright green of creosote bush. Day or night, the smell was of dust. Sometimes, also, if they were near the cabin, there was the living fragrance of cows. The creosote bush, if brushed against, had its own strong smell, of course, but the primary smells were, first dust, second cows.

(Later in the season, furry leaves of the little bajada lupine, a beautiful flower at close range but low and small enough to be easily overlooked, offered drops of dew, held carefully like transparent glass beads. Tiny, delicate toadflax and stands of frail desert leeks, both with heavenly light-blue flowers, cast slender shadows on the ground. Primrose opened wide to the morning, some yellow, others almost white but lightly tinted pink. None of the early spring blooms of the high desert are large or showy. All are shy and close to the ground, living, it seems, on the scant moisture from morning dew.)

The heat of midday brought with it the illusion that the afternoon sun stood unchanging for hours, but spending those hours around the cabin dispelled the illusion, demonstrating by movement of shade that the sun too was moving across the cloudless sky. The front steps, facing south, however, were always in full sun, the tiny back deck, under an extension of the roof, looking off to the Cabezas, always shaded.

Every morning my first self-appointed task was to make coffee. As soon as darkness began to leak away, I would begin opening venetian blinds -- those on the east opened last and never all the way, because David liked to stay in bed later, the two west windows and one north over the sink all the way as soon as the sun was up.

Windows and blinds facing south were most judiciously and gradually adjusted, slats tilted to let in light but guard privacy (although the road was some distance from the cabin), the tilt monitored and changed little by little until finally maximum light streamed in. Before we left for the day’s adventures, however, we closed those south blinds tight, for while morning’s warmth was comforting, a full afternoon of sunlight would have turned the small cabin into an oven by later in the day.

When we came home in late afternoon, we would slide a few windows open from the bottom and open the south blinds partway, on a slant, permitting evening air to circulate until sunset (which came on early in January and gradually later as the weeks went by), when I closed all windows and blinds tight again, this time to hold in whatever of the day’s heat remained. As the season advanced, we also took to leaving the heavy front and back doors of the cabin open in the evenings so that air might pass through the cabin by way of the screen doors, taking away the heat of the day.

During the day, a large mirror above the gas heater faced the front door, and the mirror would reflect and intensify the south light in the cabin’s interior. There was no excluding the sun. Even with the blinds fully closed, the days were awash in light. Meanwhile, monitoring and adjusting light and air through windows and blinds was an integral part of each desert day’s ritual, and I relished the task, set for me by the sun and mountains rather than by any capricious human mandate.

At night, against the endless black of the sky, the shining stars far outnumbered those even in our northern Michigan sky, while cows continued to shuffle around the cabin, grazing in the dark. Off in the distance rose a coyote chorus, sounding much farther from the cabin than our northern Michigan coyotes sound from our old farmhouse, where they seem to be serenading us from below our bedroom window, though it’s doubtful they are any closer than the willow-lined creek. 

Stars and coyotes in the high desert – so familiar, so like home, and yet reminding us constantly that we were somewhere else, very far from home.

Arrival of Autumn, 2014

Back road, Leelanau, October

One day in August the eye catches a few leaves turned prematurely red on an otherwise green tree, and that red-bearing twig is an intimation, but it is still August, after all, until August slides seamlessly into September, but even then every day is still full of warmth and sun or, if rain comes along, the thunderstorms come like summer rain, passing quickly, with returning blue sky and warm light and every petal and leaf and edge in sharp, bright focus and lake waters still inviting swimmers free of school, and it seems that this year, at last, impossible wishes will be granted, and summer will never end. The solstice slips by, unremarked. And then one day it comes.

People sniff the air like dogs. Some shiver and reach for sweaters, while others breathe deeply and smile. The air is damp and carries a rich, earthy aroma of mold and decay. All around, warm life appears wrapped in a thin, transparent, crackling sheet of interstellar cold, the heat and the cold held in tension, equally powerful, the outcome of their struggle still in doubt, while underfoot the soil is breathing so slowly it almost seems to be holding its breath, and by the edge of the woods, where yesterday there was only grass and Queen Anne’s-lace and milkweed, today there is a silent ring of small brown mushrooms, and further down the hill a cluster of puffballs, and out in the meadow the deep rose and pale lavender and deep purple of asters have opened to the late-arriving dawn.

“Indian summer,” say the tourists, happy for the fall color, but there’s been no hard frost yet. This is simply fall. Summer is over at last.

Maybe there will be Indian summer after the frost this year, and maybe there won’t. For now, apples, pumpkins and squash jostle late sweet corn, tomatoes and zucchini at the busy farmstands, and while the time for elderberries and blueberries is past, ripe blackberries can yet be plucked from unruly canes. (It’s too soon to gather wild grapes, which need a frost to make them sweet.) Hay has been cut and baled. Here and there sowings of winter rye green the fields.

Hawks sightings are rarer now, although for weeks the hawks were everywhere, along the highways and high above the fields. The memory of monarch butterflies, single individuals and rare, sparse clouds, is prolonged by shared photographs and stories, as Canada geese, the last of the season’s migrants to depart, gather on the ground to debate flight schedules.

Wild turkeys are gathering, also, in larger and larger groups, but they, like the chickadees, will stay throughout the winter. They are not fair-weather residents. The deer will stay, too, as will coyotes, raccoons, skunks, and all species of mouse. 

Ah, the mice! Whenever there is a sudden change in the weather, mice can be expected to invade the house. Days and nights suddenly become cold, the first fall nights of furnace heat, triggering a rush of immigrants, but months later on a winter thaw will bring them in again. As long as the weather is settled, they seem to stay put. It’s different with the coyotes, abroad on every calm night and still day, signaling to each other with yips and howls, coming nearer the house or at least seeming too, their voices perhaps only sounding closer as the air grows colder.