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fast White Pine growth
Tuesday, September 8 2009
There are a bunch of White Pines (as well as a few Eastern Junipers) growing on the enormous mound of trucked-in soil and rock that serves as our household septic field. Though they've only been growing since we moved in about seven years ago, many of these trees are already several feet taller than I am. With this year's rain, increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the absence of toxic chemicals in our sewage, these trees are growing faster than ever. I measured the new growth for the main stem of one of the pines today and it was 35 inches. [Subsequent measurements of the new growth of other septic field White Pines have been in the range of 31 to 43 inches, and the tree with 43 inches of growth grew only 31 inches last year.]
Just because it's such a straightforward deployment of physical effort, I've continued with my increasingly-neurotic greenhouse well excavation project, even though the fruits (as measured in five gallon buckets of removed material) are now down to less than one per day. Three feet into the bedrock, there are no longer any fractures or even weak adhesions between strata I can exploit. Every teaspoon of rock is hard-won, usually requiring some combination of masonry saw, electric hammer drill, and hammer-driven cold chisel. I've been careful to wear ear protection and avoid inhaling dust, because at this rate of excavation I'm probably damaging my own body as much as I am the bedrock.
One of the reasons to spend so much time digging is as an excuse to listen to podcasts. A great one I heard today was the Radiolab episode about Parasites. Like all the best podcasts, and Radiolab might well be the best, Radiolab pursues the story wherever it may lead, no matter how weird or troubling the results may be. For example, in this particular episode, we learn that hookworms might actually be a good remedy for people who are incapacitated by allergies. And that humans might have become bigger risk takers once they started living more intimately with cats. It seems that there is a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii that goes through two different life cycles, one in cats, and one in cat prey. When infecting cat prey (such as rats), it's to Toxoplasma gondii's benefit for the rat to be eaten by a cat, so the parasite does subtle things to the rat brain to make it less fearful of cats. Should humans get infected with Toxoplasma gondii, it might, as a matter of course, make humans less fearful of whatever it is we should fear.
During one of two different segments hookworms, there's a mention of the movie Deliverance, the movie infamous for its scene of backwoods anal rape. Occasionally I'll hear mention of a movie and realize I should get around to watching it sometime, and Deliverance is just such a movie.
In the past, seeing a movie meant renting from a movie rental place (too much foresight and running around) or getting it through Netflix (but I don't want to fuck with Gretchen's well-ordered queue). Now, though, Bittorrent is the probably the easiest way to get movies on a whim. In most cases, the time between deciding to get a movie and being able to watch it is less than an hour, a turnaround time topped only by Roku (which has a very poor selection of movies).
Tonight, then, I was able to watch Deliverance on my computer, which isn't as uncomfortable as I normally imagine it will be. It's actually a much better movie than I expected, with plenty of devastatingly creepy moments (that early scene with that scary-looking banjo-playing kid was uncommonly rich with psycho-social texture). What made the movie so eerie was its depiction of backwoods hillbillies as a sort of ghostly other living here on this continent with us. They live by their own rules, have their own standards of neatness and hygiene, and veer so far from the conventional norm as to occasionally seem supernatural. I still can't get over the casting for the various hill billies, many of whom just stood around looking creepy. And how often does one see the morbidly-geriatric and persistently-vegetative as matter-of-fact characters in a movie?
[I found a great (if overly-squeamish) behind-the-scenes account of Deliverance from the son of the author of the book it was based on.]
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