Under Attack

Well, if it’s not one thing, it’s another, as my grandmother used to say while listening to my brothers and sisters complain about one another.  Somebody was always being a victim, somebody else was always being an oppressor.  It’s a hard life, and getting harder.

In the great extramural world outside our front doors, we now have two lengthy wars, with Pakistan looking like it might join in more formally in order to produce a much bigger problem.  We have the beleaguered Republicans increasingly under the many thumbs of the inherently disorganized but oppressive Democrats (Arlen Specter can sit next to Ben Nelson when the food fight begins).  

We have the swine flu virus on the attack as well as under attack everywhere, with  Egyptians killing all their resident swine. (And what are the Egyptians, a Muslim country, doing with all those swine?  Making footballs for export?)  Surely the existence of hogs is not the immediate problem; they don't have the virus.  And eating pork is not the problem, or not a problem for swine flu, although a big problem for Muslims.

We have the Israelis insisting that the sensibilities of Jews and Muslims not be offended by referring to ‘swine flu.’  Instead they prefer irritating the sensibilities of Mexicans by referring to it as ‘Mexican flu.’  

I, myself, am at a red alert with respect to raccoons, deer, bear, and slugs in the garden and environs.  And now I am informed that the former “LilyPoint.org has now evolved into a new expanded organization called Lily Point Defenders.”  Just in time to join the 24/7 game of ‘Life As War.’  I’m not sure, however, who is the attacker that they are planning to defend against.  (Iraquis? Al Qaeda? Swine Flu? Democrats? Slugs, raccoons, etc.?)   I would have thought that, given the recent acquisition of two large parcels of land for a publically-owned marine reserve/park, the ‘defense’ mode would be behind us and we would be signing up for the ‘stewardship’ mantle.  But if it's not one thing, it's another.

Well, at least their first step is only to plan a conference  (June 20), which doesn’t sound as dangerous as what might be coming on our southern border.  (link maker isn't working again:  www.lilypd.org/1/Home.html)

Life's Mysteries

I’m supposed to be hard at work getting ready for an exhibit that opens next Friday.  I am the ‘guest quilt artist’ at the Sunshine Coast Quilt Guild biennial (if that means every two years) Quilt Show.  Which means that I have a small, enclosed on three sides section of the hall where I will hang about a dozen wall quilts.  One of them isn’t finished yet, all of them need precisely cut dowels from which to hang, all of them need specific wall labels, all of them need a single 'exhibit book' whose pages describe them and me.  None of those things are done, though all are more or less in the process.  

Yesterday, I was told that the irregularly-shaped (19.5x8.5x12 feet, with the fourth side the entry way), semi-enclosed space was losing maybe two feet on one side.  This means that instead of being a semi-enclosed room, it is now more like a 6 or 6.5 foot-wide corridor.  Sigh.  Well, the Guild is not the owner of the room, and they cannot demand that furnishings be removed, but I am the sort of unhappy recipient of the effects of that fact.  Doing those last minute/days details suddenly dropped lower on my priority list.

And thus, this morning, instead of setting to the quilting work, I found myself vacuuming the insides of our Subaru Forester.  Last week, Ed washed it (just in time for all the alder pollen to fall and attach itself to the shiny surface: alder pollen is something of a menace in more than one way: allergies and stick-to-surfaces).  Although we’re responsible about maintenance of house and car, we are neither of us reliable house/car keepers with respect to constant attention to dust and the like, so it’s a kind of entertaining activity when I do get around to doing it.  

In the process of removing all the mats and vacuuming under them and cleaning all the vinyl surfaces, I did something which caused the car lights to turn on.  I checked all the switches, but nothing I did caused the tail light, hatch light, or front yellow light (running light?) to turn off.  We actually turned the motor on and off and nothing resulted in those lights turning off (this was like doing a reboot, I think).  

Finally, Ed decided to remove the fuse from that circuit so the battery didn’t run down.  Reading the car manual to find the fuse box (amazingly, tightly hidden behind something the manual refers to as a ‘coin holder,’ I eventually discovered a page about something called ‘safety lights,’ which appear to be the very ones that were problematically on and that, says the manual, run independently of the ignition.  Their switch is hidden behind the steering wheel, in the center at the top.  This is not the switch that turns on the flashing safety lights; this is some different set of safety lights that neither of us had ever known were there.  We’ve only had the car for 10 years.  

It may be the mark of having too much if after ten years you still don’t know what you have.

Exotic Tulip

Is this a red tulip crossed with a yellow venus fly-trap?

Negotiations

We have now moved/are moving past the threat to growing plants from the deer and onto the full-bore threat from the slugs.  Some years when we have pretty cold or pretty long winters, the slug populations seem to diminish somewhat, or at least to consist of smaller slugs.  This year, however, despite the long AND cold winter, the slugs are plentiful and sizable.  A friend reports that she and her husband are collecting a couple of hundred of an evening.  And I don’t ask what they are doing with this collection, but I doubt if it involves a happy, museum-type ending.

I try not to plant much that the slugs are interested in.  In my experience, they don't have much interest in peonies.  When we bought our house 18 years ago, there was one sizeable, pink peony growing.  It kept getting bigger and we bought three more of different colors (white, red-violent, and darker pink) to keep it company.  Then, two years ago, I decided it was time to address the aging condition of the original peony which had now begun to produce fewer blooms.  So one day in the fall, I had Ed dig it up for me.  It was an enormous root/corm/whatever that part of the peony is called.  I read and read on the internet and did as I was told:  cut it up in smaller pieces with several eyes at least in each section, let it dry for a bit, replanted it.  And replanted it.  And then replanted it a little more because there was so much, with great hopes that the planting depth was right, which seems to be a critical factor with peonies.

I re-planted maybe 40 of them, and their first spring, at least 30 of them showed up to join the circus that is my garden.  Only two or three of these new plants bloomed last year, but I was actually surprised that any of them did.  I thought they might need some time to grow up.  Now, here they are all back, but the slugs have decided, given the abundance, that they might at least try out peony stalks in the off chance that they’re worth the effort.  What they have done, apparently, is climb about six inches up the 10-inch stalk, nibble around on the under-side of the stalk and then decide they don’t taste good.  They jump off, I imagine, plummeting to the ground, shortly followed by the upper end of the stalk which now has insufficient support because of the wedge taken out below it.

Two peony stalks gone so far.  This may require more serious measures.  Or maybe I just share my bounteous peony stalks with the slugs if they can show some discretion.  I mean, when I last offered to share a dozen small dahlias with them, they ate them all overnight.

Spring Springing Yet Some More

We drove up to B.C (the Sunshine Coast) on Wednesday, the day after the border meeting.  It is heart-breaking to leave the Point at this time of the year because everything (or at least something else) is just about to burst into bloom, including all the fruiting trees in our orchard.  We’ve had the daffodils at our house and they’re still looking great.  The purple blooms of the lunaria (silver dollar) are just starting, but they will go on and on.  However, the tulips are showing the colors in their buds and I don’t know whether they’ll last another two weeks, especially if we have a lot of rain, so I picked a dozen of them to take with us.  It is a good thing that the CBP allows us to move cut flowers over the border.  The tulips are now at home on our dining room table in Roberts Creek, pink and gold ones, orange ones with green mottling, and red ones with frilly edges, all happily blooming and helping me to fulfill my promise to keep at least a few flowers in the house all year long.

As we left, we stopped so Ed could take a picture of the spectacular show of daffodils on Tyee, the long block from Benson to Gulf.  The P.R. Garden Club has taken on the establishment and planting of this long row of berms on both side of the street, with the assistance (financial and material) of the County.  Last year was the first blooming spring in these beds and they were indeed very lovely, but this spring they are truly spectacular.  The show of bulbs began in March with beautiful little crocuses.  Now we have a world of bright yellow and pale yellow daffodils.  And the garden club keeps these beds blooming until fall with appropriate flowers of the season.  When the tall cosmos finished last year and were, at last, uprooted to prepare for the fall re-planting, it made for a fitting if hard to watch ending for this show.

What a spectacular job they have done with this.  In Vancouver, they also have big, fancy flower displays in spring, especially along Georgia near the entrance to Stanley Park.  But those are provided for us watchers by the city itself, and planted and tended by city employees.  In Pt. Roberts, it is a gift from our neighbors to all of us.  Thank you, very much, all of you who put in the work to make this happen!  We are truly in your debt.

Breaking News

Tonight, the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) sent up a phalanx of officers to alleviate our concerns, here in Point Roberts. We had a 2-star General, at least one 1-star General and eleven other CBP folks of elevated rank (all packing clearly visible guns in holsters) to talk to the maybe 80 people who turned out from the community. The CBP people were distributed in groups of 3 or 4 at tables around the perimeter of the room, and my first response was one of decided discomfort at the sight of so many uniforms, so many weapons.

And then matters deteriorated a bit. The meeting began badly because the CPB honchos seemed to think they had come to talk to us. Apparently, they had many individual prepared presentations, perhaps as a way of using up time, just in case the audience was at a loss for words. Twenty minutes in to their explaining what a hard job they have and what a good job they are doing, a hardy Pt. Roberts woman of a certain age (alas, not me) courageously got up and said, ‘I’m sorry; I’m not as polite as the rest of these people here, but you’ve come up here for 90 minutes and we want to talk to you, not have you talk to us. You need to hear from us.’

And, to their everlastintg credit, those CBP heavies spun on the dime, sat down and listened to us for the rest of the evening, responding appropriately to our concerns. At the end, they weren’t able to say, ‘Look, we’ll fix it all.’ But then, we didn’t expect that. We expected them to listen to us, to hear the legitimacy of our concerns. And for all I can tell, they heard. They seemed impressed with the depth of our concerns, our feelings, and our sincerity, and were not just giving us the brushoff in their responses. As one said to me afterwards, “I realized coming up here that a Nexus card isn’t just a convenience for you….it’s your life blood,’ and ‘Nobody ought to be fearful when crossing the border…at least not four times a day.’

They heard about people who have lost their Nexus cards for bizarre reasons, for trivial reasons, for no known reasons. They urged us to ask to talk to a Supervisor if we were offended by one of the CBP people’s behavior at the border. We told them that if you ask to talk to a supervisor, there is every chance that that request will be used against you in the future. We mentioned that the supervisors, even if you do talk to one, ALWAYS backs up the officer and then explains to YOU how YOU should be more understanding of the difficulty of their job. They told us to write to various CBP officers if we are displeased with the border guards’ actions or their supervisors’ responses. We told them that you never get a response. They told us to write to the Ombudsperson in Vermont; we reminded them that the Ombudsperson doesn’t reply or, if he/she does, provides you with no information. We said we needed a better process for dealing with the CPB perceived misbehaviors. They said that when we write to the Ombudsperson, be sure to mention that you’re from Pt. Roberts. The request for a better, different, independent, or common sense process for objecting to what was going on didn’t really make much headway, but then they’re not going to just say, ‘Cool, dude, I never thought of that,’ and then produce some kind of peoples’ court.

Finally, after many very specific accounts of bad or at least very dubious doings by their employees and colleagues, one of the officers (a Major) took out a note pad and started taking down peoples’ names and contact information so that they could look into the individual tales of disrespect and disorder that so many people here have been subject to over the past few years. General Michelle James (the 2-star), who was the primary speaker on behalf of the CBP seemed almost shocked by what she was hearing, as she again and again tried to assure us that ‘such things’ shouldn’t be happening. And that we should give them a chance.

My own feeling (which I did state) was that we no longer trusted them and it was going to take some time for them to build that trust back up but that we would be willing to try if they were; it wasn’t personal. Another local guy noted that they see us as the enemy and now we see them that way, but we’ve got to get past that, both of us. They responded that they were hearing us, that we would see changes, that they were deeply committed to professionalism, and they promised another meeting in a year (or less, was the advice of one of them privately).

Things to look for: (1) longer Nexus operating hours at least in the summer; (2) responses to complaints and to Nexus denials; (3) more clarity on the food rules (CPB did distribute a paper dated 3/30/2009) which provided current food rules, including the information that “US fruits, except citrus, may return [from Canada to the U.S.] if they are in season and clearly marked with US brand labels (For example, Washington apples with stickers).” And the officer responsible for agriculture issues (out of Blaine?) said that even citrus bought in Bellingham, e.g., labeled, packaged, and with a receipt, could go straight through to Pt. Roberts.

And some other interesting news that was not announced during the public part of the meeting but that one of the Generals told Ed and me when we were talking to him afterwards: you can now use the Nexus card in any lane because all lanes now have the ability to read the Nexus card.

My concerns were feeling a little alleviated at the end of the two hours. Anyway, I left the meeting smiling and feeling cordial, which is not always the case after meetings in Pt. Roberts, and almost never the case after a discussion of the border.

Two addresses of use from the meeting:

Michelle James
Director of Field Operations
CBP, USDHS
1000 - 2nd Ave
Suite 2200
Seattle , WA 98104-1049

Jonni Galarza
Passenger Service Manager
USDHS
9901 Pacific Highway
Blaine, WA 98230
(jonni.galarza@dhs.gov)
(360-332-6091)

Sad to say, I was not able to find a web page for the Seattle Operations Office of CBP that provided any detailed information about the names/phone numbers of the various officials operating out of that office. It may be there, but in 15 minutes or so of googling, I didn’t find it.

Story with Moral(s)

This is a story with maybe too many morals, but at least a story with many lessons, a story of attraction and distraction, a story of unexpected change and of invasion and battle, of ignorance and of failure to pay attention.

About ten years ago, we were given a dozen or so rhododendron and azalea bushes that originally lived farther south in Washington state. They were old (and large) bushes, and came to us with big, burlap-bagged, soil-encrusted roots. The first year they bloomed, at the base of two of the bushes were lovely little scilla plants, a kind blue-bell-like flowerbulb that I was familiar with and it was nice to have more of them. At the base of the biggest rhodo that first year, there was a little plant I didn’t know: it looked like a tiny, wild-type of cranesbill, maybe, with little pink flowers, like wild geraniums, but pinker. Nice little flower.

After a few years, the little pink flower plant spread around a bit and I noticed when I was weeding around it that it had a kind of unpleasant smell, but I didn’t spend a lot of time smelling it so not a problem. After six or seven years, the little pink plant’s smell was getting a little more oppressive because it was spreading throughout our very large garden (maybe 7-8,000 square feet) and you could smell it everywhere you went. I started asking around. People called it ‘stinky pinky’ and ‘stink plant’ and an expert gardener friend ID-ed it as something called ‘herbe Robert.’ So, by then I had two very unappealing names and one very pretentious one for a plant whose acquaintance I’d definitely like to unmake.

For the past three years, I’ve been trying to get rid of it. It turns out to be one of those plants that reseeds at a world class rate under all the conditions that I’ve got going: sun, shade, dry season, wet season, and during at least nine months of the year it appears to be engaging in growing, seeding, and regrowing. It is shallow rooted, but it also seems to propagate at least in some cases along a elongated shallow root system. Finally, it is just as happy growing in open areas as in areas already heavily populated by other plants where it threads its way into the existing plant arrangements and thus becomes rather unreachable. It occupies every tiny niche in the midst of a shasta daisy clump or a large cluster of crocosmyias, e.g.. Finally, my garden has a lot of wild columbines growing in it and the ‘wretched pink flower’ (my preferred name for this invader) looks, when it first comes up just like wild columbine when it first comes up. Thus, it is hard to pull it up at that point because I’m not sure what I’m pulling up.

The is a plant with a terrific evolutionary strategy, except for the awful smell. I mean what good is that doing it? The slugs aren’t interested in it and there isn’t much else here that messes with plants that small (it barely gets more than 4 inches above ground). Although maybe the slugs aren’t messing with it because it smells bad, but it is hard to imagine that something like a slug would have a highly developed sensitivity to a bad smell, given its own unseemly characteristics.

Its evolutionary strategy feels like it might be much more powerful than any commitment I could make to remove it from my garden, but nevertheless, this year I am making the big push. I spend at least an hour every day I work in the garden solely working on exterminating this plant once it is big enough for me to identify. You can’t leave piles of them around because they just re-root in the pile of pulled plants on the ground, so they all have to be dried out on the burn pile and then burned in the burn pile. I think that, compared to bind weed/wild morning glory (which I have done a pretty good job of eradicating) and Scotch broom (which we have done an excellent job of eradicating on our acre of land), this job is undoable, but nevertheless, here I am trying to do it.

So what’s the moral? Beware of Greeks bearing gifts? Soonest broke soonest mended? Look before you leap? Once burnt, twice shy? Ignorance is bliss? Beauty is only skin deep? Act in haste, repent in leisure? Let patience grow in your garden always? Or maybe the lesson I've learned from our bear and raccon co-residents: Live and let live?