Lost in Space

    

http://www.jeffs60s.com/images/lost_in_space_robot.jpg

Let's touch back in with my life as a 60s adventure-comedy, which means not only needlessly complicated, but with that odd play of absurd cliff-hanger and stilted beginning.  Last week, as you recall...

Instead of avoiding mosquitoes by simply closing the doors and cranking up the AC, a vice I avoid at home; instead of preventing mosquitoes with appropriate blasts of chemical fog and larval-disintegration water-additives; instead of building the dogs their own elaborate Versailles fountains to frolic in; instead, for half-cocked ecologies--I open the doors for the doubtful July breeze, pretend I can slap the mosquitoes flat before I'm drained of blood, I harvest rain-water, keep buckets for the tomatoes and a small pool for the dogs, and then I acquired 6 Wal-mart goldfish, 38 cents each, one red betta and a lonely frog all living in the pool to eat the mosquito-larvae.  Sure. Obvious way to go.
       

Let's say it was working.  Humor me.  Until I noticed that despite the monsoons of June and early July, the pool wasn't staying full. On a rare rainless day, I found the problem--the pool plastic had become brittle enough through a couple years to have a fine crack along the base.  I kept the goldfish afloat through the 4th, hauling buckets of water across the yard, and then made the cross-county pilgrimage to that hub of environmental supplies, Toys-R-Us.

There, I had exactly one color choice, lime green with little fish at odd angles, so I paid my ten dollars and the supply-guy turtle-walked the pool on his head out to my Jeep.  The back doesn't open of course, someone trying to break in while I was in KC a couple years ago having damaged the lock, so supply-guy and I contorted it into the back seat. This worked fine, as long as I didn't need to use the headrest while I was driving, nor need to see anyone behind me for lane changes.  No problem.

At home, amidst major barking, I got the pool into the yard, thus:

And soon had water and elements of fish-world in place.

All good.  Ready to transfer the goldfish, the betta and the frog.  In the shallow marsh of the blue pool, it wasn't hard to scoop up the frog, and then in short order, the red betta and the four goldfish.  Tune in next week, for...

Oh.  You noticed.  6 goldfish before, 4 now.  Um-hm.  I stirred the muck, watched for gold fins flickering under leaves or twigs in fishy defiance. Nothing. I had planned to empty out the blue pool, let it dry, and then try to epoxy and duct tape it enough to have it function for another season of rain-harvest, but I left the muck there to watch for stragglers for a few days, just in case.

No.  No fish appeared.  Did those two finally die of transfer shock from the Wal-mart tank, to plastic bag, to the vagaries of rainwater? Were they stepped on or sloshed out when the younger puppy takes the plunge on hot days? Had the cats figured out a new species to stalk and torment? Snakes slithering in and out?  Seems unlikely. When bright green snakes or those more suspiciously brown hatch around here, I usually find their wounded and chewed, headless bodies left along the walk. Raccoons?  Maybe, but the dogs are adamant in not sharing yard-space with them.  Not enough mosquitoes to munch?  Quite unlikely. That frog had bigger jaws than I thought?

What intrigues me in all this, this comedy production, is how one small watery-island becomes linked to so many other lives, and insists on so much consideration.  

* * *

Three weeks later, long after I'd given up on the missing goldfish duo, the constant rains have kept the blue pool from drying out.  In a rare, canine-still moment, I look in the blue pool and see 5 small frogs, same type as the larger one I'd moved.  They stared up at me, 5 sets of eyes just poking out of the shallows.  They don't line up like cows or clump together like sheep.  No herd, this.  Indeed, they all sat dispersed through their four-foot world, all all different angles, watching me.  Random?  An accident of that moment?  Some species defense, an amphibian radar?

There's enough muck in the bottom of the pool that the leak has slowed, though not stopped.  Sigh.  I'm committed now, with these new inhabitants, to pouring rainwater into their micro-marsh.  They stare up at me.  I blink first.
   

http://wiseacre-gardens.com/wallpaper/frogs/frog-eyes.jpg

* * *

"Micro-marsh."  I like that.  I've been churning around the idea of micro-wild lately (a term I'm coining, though doubtless someone else has used this or something more profound; I'm caught as much by the assonance as anything else), and will sometime write more about these other public, not-quite-seen, so necessary spaces. 
  

 

(I didn't have a good photo, so I ran up the street behind the First Presbyterian Church and found this.)

We should have in mind wildlife corridors, those green swaths stitched together on a massive scale. Here's a rather formal definition from Monica Bond :

Wildlife movement corridors, also called dispersal corridors or landscape linkages as opposed to linear habitats, are linear features whose primary wildlife function is to connect at least two significant habitat areas. These corridors may help to reduce or moderate some of the adverse effects of habitat fragmentation byfacilitating dispersal of individuals between substantive patches of remaining habitat, allowing for both long-term genetic interchange and individuals to re-colonize habitat patches from which populations have been locally extirpated.  

This has become a major effort for many organizations, such as the National Wildlife Federation.  There's a plan in Florida, and the World Wildlife Federation has a Great Plains Freedom to Roam project, while some dream of a fully restored Buffalo Commons, a massive space through 10 states--something that won't work unless we have quite a change in how we think about property rights.  

California is doing some interesting roadkill studies, to see where animals get into trouble, but others have doubts that these wildlife corridors work very well.

In any case, animals, plants, and however much we don't realize it, us--all of us are in trouble.  The large green spaces are ebbing away, being developed away, and the small green spaces aren't much respected. We approach a time when sustaining even the smallest place of life becomes, like feeding wild birds, an act of grace.

later, bob