Under The Lens

You built your tower strong and tall,

can’t you see it’s got to fall someday?

Townes Van Zandt

“Tower Song”

 Spring is the time of sprouts and seedlings, buds and leaves, floods and flowers, growth and nest-building — the soggy, saturated season that stirs thoughts I don’t other months entertain.

Honestly, this tiptoe introspection only seems to get worse, or is it better, as I grow older, wiser. I’m not complaining. I welcome imaginative probes, new thoughts sprouting from old, old regenerating from new, no rhyme nor reason, just random thoughts, one piling atop another, some helpful, others not, all tightening a sturdy chestnut frame. I call it processing, what separates you and me from that statuesque whitetail standing and watching your approach from just inside the tree line, or turkeys scattering into the trees with rambunctious, tail-wiggling Lily and Chubby in hot pursuit. Yeah, those creatures can process, too. No doubt about it. But not like we do. The difference is our ability to let the mind scamper off, trying along the way to capture fleeting, zigzagging memories, no fears, no rules or restrictions; just free, uninhibited play, always the best kind, the mind an enticing playground.

So here I sit in just such a liberated state, following a lively ramble with the dogs. After a few days of innkeeping chores I enjoy when serving the right people, I and the four-legged kids snaked our way around familiar hayfield perimeters, down a slippery escarpment point and across a narrow frozen beaver channel I’ll soon have to skirt if I want to stay dry along the riverside plain’s edge. Not today. The ice could still be crossed at one shady spot, which, of course, the dogs went directly to without even thinking. I guess it’s instinct, although they’d swim if they had to, or, then again, maybe if they just felt like it. I just watch and follow. They seem to have a sixth sense for such things, and I respect it. Actually, we help each other. I like to believe they respect my human sixth sense, which I employ for maneuvers they’re not as adept at. We use each other to our own advantages, are loyal friends and companions, no lies or deceit, no lust to distort vision. I’ll probably outlive them both and be sad when they go, always ready to greet anew another. Someday, my pets will outlive me. That’s life. We all come and go, not a thing we can do about it, regardless of chapel attendance.

My thoughts this morning were particularly ephemeral, flittering from one subject to another like a hummingbird dancing from blossom to blossom in a sweet, thorny upland pasture. These graceful cranial gymnastics were sparked by a weekend inn booking, a Friday-night visit to a presentation on a familiar topic, and conversations here and there about Indians, history, discontinued roads, cellar holes, old families and first loves gone bitter and distasteful, the kind you hack up and spit. All talk. Nothing more. And talk is cheap, lies cheaper still. But we all do it, endure and vanish. You win some, lose some, and it often comes down in the end to luck of the draw, roll of the dice, a simple coin flip, some outcomes happy, others brutally sad. The way it is.

I share these inner thoughts because I entertained all of them and many more on my post-breakfast walk with the dogs on a gray March morning; raw, not cold, actually refreshing once my heart got pumping with force enough to show on my open-necked jacket zipper. My mind wandered in and out of that old Asa Sanderson house in West Whately, the woods surrounding it, the reservoirs, the streams, the hidden roadside relics and foggy Indian mist, all of which I know well and probably knew even better before I stumbled upon them in this life. That house, those woods, the waters and others in this place I call home are pulsing through my system. I believe that and am convinced it was as much the lurking kindred spirits as the young seductress who called it home that lured me in. Call me crazy but I do believe deeply rooted diversions usually cannot be attributed to simple coincidence.

At the same time these inner thoughts captivated me, nighttime moon nearing full bloom, my mind kept wandering back to that Susan Morse PowerPoint presentation on New England cougar re-emergence, and how what she said in so many ways mirrored a dynamic I’ve noticed between establishment spokespeople and credentialed, independent researchers relying on identical or at least similar degrees to study the same topics and arrive at different conclusions. I’ve watched this perplexing, at times counter-productive battle unfold between folks folks who routinely receive government grants and competing independent researchers who, because they have unconventional or maybe even unpopular views, are dole-excluded. I remember watching this curious game unfold during a long Atlantic salmon-restoration debate ultimately lost by the authorities, again in what promises to be a long, drawn-out controversy that will also be lost by those spewing government doctrine, and now — imagine that! — here it comes again in what appears to me at least to be veiled yet open warfare between professional and amateur archaeologists working to piece together evidence left behind by the indigenous tribes we displaced from the Pioneer Valley four centuries ago.

To be perfectly honest, it’s hard for me to get my head around this stuff. Disruptive infighting acts only as an obstacle, not a quick, cooperative path to discovery. You’d think all parties would understand this, know that the fastest route to the truth is achieved by combining in a blender diverse ideas and opinions and furiously liquefying it into a frothy serum. But, no, seldom does it happen that way. Not when egos enter the fray and someone has to be in charge. Then headstrong supervisors tend to narrow the focus to theirs, demanding compliance, no time-consuming distractions or devil’s advocacy, please. This rigid my-way-or-the-highway approach is usually a path to flawed conclusions.

Which brings me back to that Morse lecture, hosted by the Shelburne Grange at the First Congregational Church’s Fellowship Hall. The Power-Point presentation drew an overflow community crowd, filling the parking lot and then some. I love to watch small-town gatherings like that, so folksy and old-fashioned. You name it, they were there: from town officials, firemen and police to farmers and merchants and restless toddlers voicing loud objections, even a veteran, out-of-town veterinarian, all but the babies interested to hear what Morse had to say about cougars. Trust me, her conclusions were not what state and federal wildlife officials like to hear. No sir. Not by a long shot. She says wayward, migrating Western cougars have been dispersing through the Northeast for decades and will continue to do so on their comeback trail. Not only that but, if it has not already happened in the highest, steepest, stoniest, most remote places, a reproductive New England population will soon arrive. This the opinion of a Vermonter and card-carrying wildlife biologist with the papers to prove her acumen. Morse has studied cougars and bobcats and lynxes and bears and coyotes and wolves from one end of this continent to the other — north, south, east and west —  and she doesn’t hesitate to say that the big feline predators are wandering back after being pushed out more than 100 years ago. One crucial argument confirms a point you likely have read right here and maybe questioned. We’re talking about the new revelation that there is one and only one North American mountain lion, and it ranges from Ecuador to northern Canada. What is meant by this is that all the 2011 press releases and newspaper stories about “Eastern cougar” reclassification from endangered to extinct was meaningless policy penned by card-carrying doctors of wildlife who cash hefty establishment paychecks. Imagine that: no difference in mitochondrial DNA between the Western cougar, the Florida panther or what came to be known as Eastern cougar. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, government officials. How embarrassing! Yes, the emperor is parading through the courtyard in his new clothes and is buck naked.

Believe me, I know quite well the “official position” on cougar re-emergence after being “warned off” the subject for parts of four decades by state and federal officials I respect and have maintained friendly, respectful relationships with, despite ignoring their pleas to be silent. The reason for my continuing coverage of the unpopular subject has always been simple: most of the people who have reported sightings have been credible — end of freakin’ story. I trusted them and went with their tales in print as establishment officials cried “inappropriate” and “irresponsible.” I ignore them, listened to timid witnesses.

And now here we go down a similar path with the recent archaeological stuff I’ve submerged myself in. I just keep plugging, have read much more, listened to many additional sources, been sternly “warned off” and threatened but can’t ignore it. Far too interesting. The result is that I find myself confused, amused and more determined than ever to unveil the truth. Why accept official findings when you suspect them to be invalid. Sorry, I don’t flee confusion or intimidation. I try to let incendiary topics burn, bringing them into clear focus, and must admit I’m getting there slowly but surely on this subject in my “spare time.” The people who’d most like me quiet must be happy I can’t devote all my time to this story, because it’s fascinating and, trust me, will definitely stir reader-interest.

So, stay tuned and, in the meantime, allow me to leave you with a perplexing little query. That is: Why do you suppose some experts with “nothing to hide” squirm so when clipped to the microscope’s stage?

Don’t overthink. It ain’t rocket science.

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