Past Blogs

Lakes are fluid in more than the literal sense. They change size and even disappear. Any list comparing the size of the world’s largest lakes will change…even in the short span of a few decades.

This is how I have come to live on the shores of the world’s fifth-largest freshwater lake as measured by surface area. When we purchased our lake lot 40 years ago, Lake Michigan was only in sixth place. To be blunt but factual, the Soviet Union destroyed the vast Aral Sea, thus moving Lake Michigan up the list.

Before the 1950’s the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth-largest lake. By 1997, it had shrunk to 10% of its original size and split into four lakes. By 2014, the eastern basin had completely dried up.

The destruction began when Soviet engineers began diverting the two mountain rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, that fed the lake with snowmelt. The goal was to grow cotton in the desert. The cotton bloomed, but the Aral Sea fishing economy collapsed. Coastal towns found themselves high, dry, covered in blowing salty dust and suffering from hotter summers and colder winters.

The uptake here appears to be, “Never underestimated the ability of people to destroy the environment.”

Our Lake Michigan level is at record highs this year. Our beach has disappeared and half of our stairs have been claimed by the waves, but we are not complaining. We’ve got water.

A friend recently sent us a minute-long video she recorded. It depicts an amazing moment and begs to be shared. But first, here is a bit of background information to make it even more enjoyable…if that is possible.

Bats are marvelous creatures. The only true flying mammals (squirrels glide) they fly with their “hand wings”. The bones in their wings are elongated finger bones with small thumbs used for climbing. Thin, fragile skin membrane fills the space between the fingers. Anatomically, bat flight and bird flight are totally different mechanisms.

To understand how a bat flies, just mimic the arm motions of the butterfly breast swimming stroke. Bats row through the air. Strong muscles in their backs and chests enable them to create an up-stroke and powerful down-stroke.

A bat mom gives birth hanging upside down from her perch and catches her blind and furless pup in her wings. She has only one baby, but it’s a big one, about one-third of her weight. Mom cradles her pup in her tail pouch.

Like all mammal mothers, mom nurses her baby and it grows fast. Pups start learning to fly after 3 weeks. By 6 weeks they can catch insects by themselves and no longer need mom’s milk. By three months they are independent.

One huge danger lurks for mothers and pups. The bats in a majority of species cannot take flight from the ground. They must drop down 2 or 3 feet before they can fly. So a pup who falls to the ground from its roosting site is in serious trouble…mom can’t come to its rescue.

See how this pup solves its problem….thanks to its thumbs and a well-designed bat nesting site.

“Lots of squeaking from box above. One more look before I take her out of there… Before I can do that, watch what happens as the pup suddenly gathers herself up and…” (click here or on picture below)

Here’s a tricky trivia question. Where is the only place in North America where the Euro is the official currency?

You would have to travel to the tiny French islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon about 12 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland to spend those Euros. In a concession to their geographic location, the locals do accept both Canadian and American dollars.

France’s empire in the New World once covered a vast swath of land. At its peak in 1712, it extended from Newfoundland to the Canadian prairies and from Hudson’s Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. This territory encompassed all the Great Lakes. By 1873, defeats in wars, treaties and other circumstances reduced France’s sphere to the 87 square miles of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.

These extremely wind-swept islands were settled by fishermen from Brittany, Normandy and the Basque region of France. For over a century they caught and salted the plentiful cod. But in the 1920’s, a more lucrative business flourished, bootleg liquor.

America passed prohibition, and Saint-Pierre became the epicenter for smuggling Canadian whiskey, Caribbean rum and French wines into the States. Fishermen abandoned the fish in favor of running distilleries and smuggling operations. Even Al Capone spent some time in this Prohibition hot spot.

With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the smuggling business collapsed. But the island’s most important historic moment was yet to come. On Christmas Eve, 1943, De Gaulle’s exiled Free France Government (the resistors of Vichy France) secured the island in a bloodless coup thus denying the Axis Powers a foothold in North America.

Today the islands of 6,000 French citizens are bastions of French culture. The tourist industry predominates…French restaurants, bakeries and wines are irresistible draws.

But if I need a French fix, I probably will not visit these islands. They are over 2,200 miles from my home, a bit more than halfway to Paris. And transportation costs are about equal.

Then again, life is full of surprises. If I ever find myself in Fortune, Newfoundland, I’ll definitely take the ferry ride over. I never turn down a genuine croissant in my vicinity.

My knowledge of physics is almost nonexistent, but there is one principle that I grasp: Objects in motion tend to remain in motion.

I am one of those objects and I love to keep moving. Nothing beats a sunny day, an open road and a drive to places I’ve never been. I’m not a risk taker, but I’m a born traveler with unending curiosity for the wonders of the world, both natural and man-made. “Are we there yet?” was not something I said as a child. I was too busy checking out the scenery and playing the license plate game.

I’ve often wondered if a love of travel is a learned behavior or hard-wired in the genes. Whichever it is, everyone in my family, both young and old, is always ready for a trip. One of my aunts went to a World’s Fair in Montreal when she was in her seventies. When I asked her if she was going on a tour, her reply was, “Of course not, I don’t want the old people to slow me down.”

Currently, the pleasure police are hard at work trying to give all us vagabonds a big guilt trip about the environmental evils of traveling. Confining myself to my own acre and the small towns near me, as much as I love my home places, would not be good for my spirit.

I will continue to hit the real road, not the guilt trip road. And, incidentally, I have been averaging 44 miles per gallon this summer while doing it. Yesterday, I hit 49.1 mpg. on my way to work. I’m going for 50 next.

Note: Although I purposefully do not venture into politics in my weekly blog, I make one exception each year during the week of the Fourth of July.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Samuel Johnson

“Patriotism is your conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it”. George Bernard Shaw

Although these quotes are witty and insightful, I believe that patriotism can be a positive value. For most of my life, I was proud to say, “I’m an American.” That is not to say I have been unaware of my country’s faults. Japanese Americans were in internment camps when I was born, Joe McCarthy was destroying lives with his lies about a red scare when I was in grade school and the Civil Rights struggles were waged when I was a young adult. Yet with all our faults, I never doubted that America was always slowly moving forward to higher ideals. I never doubted the basic goodness of most Americans. Until now.

At this dark moment in American history, I believe Americans do have a patriotic duty. That duty is to squarely face the fact that our country is no longer a democracy. We will not be able to reclaim the vision of our founders if we are in denial that our democratic principles are being egregiously eroded every day.

The list of assaults is devastating: refugees fleeing tyranny are being treated like criminals, corporations are writing the laws of our land, the Citizens United decision allows politicians to be bought and gerrymandering is allowed by the highest court in our land. These are not the hallmarks of a Democracy.

One of the wisest observers of the American scene, Alexis de Tocqueville, said, “The greatness in America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather, in her ability to repair her faults.”

We have much to fix. Patriots (not the scoundrel and flag-waving variety) are needed.