Almost, though not quite

Rather touchingly, the park I pass on my way to work each morning has a small replica of bog & pond life as found in the woodlands where I've been fooling around half my life.

There's a bench here too, where I can sit and inhale the smell of ferns, lichen and acidic soil. And there are small signs with information about the plants, their latin names and so on.

Embarassingly, but typically, I am learning names of a lot of these plants only now.

The possibility of an orchard

I have inadvertently created optimal conditions for an orchard of rowan trees. I did this by chopping down the forest to the south of the cabin, and by keeping dogs whose scent make the moose and deer steer clear of my immediate surroundings. Moose and deer like to nibble on fresh rowan shoots.

Rowan is one of the few naturally occurring deciduous trees here, along with birch and aspen. There are oak trees fifteen km (ten miles) from here and I pass both maple and elm on my daily commute. But at this height above sea level the selection of trees is drastically lowered.

Rowan berries can be used not only for decoration but for food, though there must certainly be a limit to how much rowan jelly a guy needs. Maybe rowans can be pruned to pleasing shapes or coppiced for walking sticks.

I will keep the ones that do not threaten to block out the sun that's supposed to reach the solar panels.

Grouse cruisin'

Saw two splendid black grouse males on my way to work today. Their Latin moniker is Tetrao Tetrix and if that's not a good name for a hard rock band I don't know what is.

They are stately birds, though seemingly too well fed to make good fliers. Their wings go "flubb-a-flubba-flubb-flubb".

I actually haven't seen any black grouse males here before. Not in daylight. I've seen the hens quite often, I think, but they can be hard to tell apart from Western Capercaille females.

I realize this isn't unprecedented. It's not like seeing three pairs of mating lynx or anything. But it's enough to make me very happy.

Update, Dec. 14th: I have since seen black grouse, mostly males, every day. I have been told they hang around the logging road, where gravel obviously is insanely bountiful, to fill their gizzards.

Streams of semi-consciousness

It's one of the small, quiet joys of early winter. As the lakes freeze, you get to see the patterns in the movement of the water. The later a part freezes over, the more movement, or warmth. The water moves faster at inlets and outlets, of course, that's not such a big surprise. But always beautiful.

Slow team coming round the bend

Early winter is time for walking, rather than running. Too much snow for the rig, too little for the sled. This interferes with the dogs' fitness of course, but ideally leads to some time one-on-one. And with snow on the ground I can tell what kind of animals have crossed the path, too.

Solan and I inspected "Blind Silver Puddle", on the other side of the logging road from where we live. All seemed to be well. Solan thought we might be able to catch up with the fox that had been there some hours earlier, but he had brought along a real killjoy who said it couldn't be done.

Today's walk to work

On my way to the train station I pass these sacks of lime which are gradually emptied into the river to make the lake nearby less acidic. This is wonderful and good for the fish, of course. But being of an intrinsically idle bent, I can't help thinking of all the dreadful work that has gone into getting hold of that lime. Horrid mining, big machines, massive packing thingamajigs and transport over insane distances. All this to make up for inconveniences caused by more work, the redirecting and damming of rivers, the creation of factories to produce acidic rain and on and on. If nobody had worked themselves to the bone to mess up, nobody would have needed to spend any effort on cleaning up. And in the end we would have had more fish in the lake.

Sure, sure. A lot of other stuff would have been different.

Here's what looks like a bridge to nowhere. The fog is so thick you can't see the other shore of the lake, which makes it feel as if you're walking on the edge of the known world. I love this.

Though this looks like a snapshot from a vacation in Mordor, it is in fact the minions of the logging company widening the road. The road was originally built in the late 1700's. Logs were first laid in the direction of the road, then more logs were lain perpendicular to the ones below. Then a layer of fir branches was laid on top of it, and a whole lot of sand and gravel on top of that again. All done by muscle power (man and horse, I'm presuming), as there wasn't much choice. Now it's more a matter of putting large rocks in one place and covering it with some kind of membrane, and then top it off with sand and gravel.

I'm not sure why they're widening this part of the road, as they did a small clear cut in this area recently and even then managed to get their vehicles where they wanted them too.

Building with tarps

A couple of months ago some friends held a performance in the courtyard of a renaissance house. A good rule of thumb in this area, of course, is that no matter what the weather man says it will probably rain, so tarps were suspended over the area.

As anybody who has built with tarps knows, they will collect rainwater and eventually burst unless somebody applies some real engineering to the project. In this case, the problem was solved by attaching hoses to the lowest-hanging parts of the tarp, thus diverting the water. If I can only figure out how this was done, it might be practical in the construction of temporary sheds and the like.

Below is a tarp-and-rain-related accident waiting to happen. Note the water-filled bulge above the bed:

This is the now abandoned home of my former neighbor Mo. The picture is taken some days after he was sent to the hospital, and I was asked to collect some of his stuff. He was what is normally called a "homeless guy", except that he did have a home, this shack made of birch poles and tarp and scrounged odds and ends, situated quite close to the local train station but out of sight of everyone. I hesitate in calling Mo a friend, as he had some real serious issues and could be sort of scary when high or drunk.

I imagine what he would normally do about that rainwater catchment above his bed was simply push off the collected water after each rain. He didn't quite have his act together to make a more maintenance-free solution, though there was nothing wrong with his skills or potential.

You'd think just building a roof with a really steep angle would solve all problems, but it would need to be so steep that it for all practical purposes would be a wall. And you'd be back to square one. A method I've used (example below) is making sure ridges below the tarp create grooves that lets the water flow downwards.

Hard Core

Somewhere in the distance: You could here the banjo plucked.

This is my friend and neighbor Iv. His living conditions are to me what my living conditions are to everybody else. Until recently he didn't even use propane, but lit an open fire every time he felt like coffee.

Crossing

To get to my place, you need to cross a bog. This is, of course, maddeningly inconvenient.

But it's nice too, in a sense. It's like having a moat.

Mostly, though, it's a nuiscance. If you don't pay attention, you sink down to your thighs. Some parts of the year, If I have guests, I have to go down and greet them with spare rubber boots for them to use. And then, like some american native in a western movie, tell them to step exactly where I step.

I've spent quite some time trying to figure out how I could cross the bog while keeping my boots dry. Walking around the wettest spots makes no sense as you just end up turning ever larger parts of the bog into hideous, muddy ruts.

I could drain the thing, I guess. But this is the lowest spot in quite a large area.

In the end, I just smacked together some pressure treated boards and let them float on the softest spots. It doesn't look great, but hopefully it doesn't attract too much attention, either.

Musher Nation

Walked down to the valley with dogs Gill and Bibi to pick up provisions and post a friend had brought me, and passed neighbor G. on a run with his team.
Anybody who lives within ten miles is a neighbor.
G is a very competent and successful competitive long-distance musher, which takes the kind of dedication and mania you would need to invade a medium-sized country on a regular basis.
If he was a bicycling pro, I'd be the guy who uses a three-speed to get to work. But because mushers are so few, we still have some fat to chew when we cross paths.

This is all normal to me. Walking far to pick up mail. Chatting about mushing with other dog drivers on the way. Looking out for some nice mushrooms. Fifteen years ago, I would have thought this was either impossibly romantic, or the kind of life only other people, more clever and strong than I, could lead.
On one hand, this life is no big deal. On the other one, I feel blessed.

Food for free

Picked up some mushrooms and berries to take to town for dinner and breakfast with GF. Why on earth do I not do more of this, letting all this just rot is just insane.

One reason I don't forage more is because I never set apart enough time for dehydrating or canning, and I don't have a freezer. But those are just excuses, of course.

I got lots of time for making up those!

Troll's broth

If the temperature is reasonably high during the day, and it gets significantly cooler when the sun sets, the difference in temperature between the still warm bogs and the rapidly cooling air creates a mist that drifts lazily around beneath the trees.

This is called "troll woman's broth" or something similar in most Scandinavian languages. And is a sure sign that it's time to dig up that beanie, those flashlights and all that woolen underwear again.

Li'l feller

Beneath the awning, right next to the door that leads into my shop, there's a small cavity that each spring gets inhabited by a pair of white wagtails, who inevitably evolve into a family of white wagtails. The sound of their chirping throughout spring and into the summer months is simply fantastic. I used to be careful about not making to much sound around them, but they really don't seem to care at all.

One day this guy fell out, well before he was old enough to fly. Thankfully, my evil cat had not discovered him. I had a vague panic attack as I stuffed the chick into the nest again. Would he be rejected for smelling of human? How do these things work?

I think it went ok. They all went on chirping.

Foraging for wood

Wood for the winter has to be taken care of the preceding spring, at the latest. And though I did chop down trees and limb them this March, I've been horribly late in bucking and splitting. I fell in love, the wood could wait. I've propped the felled trees up so they haven't become soggy, but they haven't dried as much as they should have either.

There's one safety valve though, trees in the vicintiy that have fallen down on their own, and dried out over a couple of seasons. So I've dragged them home and now at least have something.

Path less traveled

Here's my path down to one of my compost heaps, the one where I dump the dogshit. This path is made by me trotting up and down once, occasionally twice a day. I find it almost shocking to see how little effort is needed to make a semi-permanent mark on the forest.