↓ Archives ↓

Archive → May, 2015

Please brake for turtles

Beginning around the I-81 overpass over Front Street in Harrisburg, and ending about half a mile south, turtles are now trying to reach loamy dirt to lay their eggs.

Oddly, sadly, many dead and dying turtles litter the roadside, hit by cars, either by accident or on purpose.

It’s difficult to plumb the depths of someone’s thinking when they deliberately drive off the roadway and onto the roadside, to crush a tiny helpless little animal like this.

Please brake for turtles. They can’t, won’t, and haven’t done anything to us humans. They deserve to live, too.

Thank you, dear departed

Memorial Day is a big deal in a Republic like America. Without the sacrifices and daily risks of our armed service personnel, America wouldn’t exist. Our daily freedoms and liberties would be replaced by fear of an all-encompassing government.

Thank you, dear departed.

People we’ve lost, then and now, still shape us

Days ago, my next door neighbor was riding bikes with his son, and he had an accident. The trauma to his head was so significant that he died yesterday, never waking up from his injury.

Doctor Jerry Luck was a hell of a nice man, and I’m very sorry he is gone. Planet Earth is a much poorer place without Jerry among us. Our condolences to his wife Kathi and their two children.

Tonight I attended a regular meeting at the Duncannon Sportsmen’s Association, where club president Carl Fox pours his endless love, energy, and devotion to recruiting new hunters, fishermen, and outdoor enthusiasts. Sitting next to me was an elderly Mr. Foultz, a name I dimly recalled.

Turns out, Mr. Foultz is from Pine Grove Mills, a small village near where I grew up. Many summer days I walked barefoot from the deep farm country across the semi-developed farm country closer to State College, to play with friends in Pine Grove Mills.

Sitting on his porch there, forty years ago, was a grumpy, quiet old man we knew as Indian Joe. He was reputed to be an actual Indian, he certainly looked dark skinned and “ethnic,” and in a location as rural and frontier-like as that area was back then, he was as good and as real and as exciting as a person could be. Indian Joe was a touchstone for the old frontier days that we could still feel and see and touch, like when someone’s dad would find an old 1790s or 1820s flintlock rifle stashed away in a barn, and people would come to see it and hold it.

Indian Joe was a central feature of many Penn State homecoming parades on College Avenue, often dressed in a nice suit and a Plains Indian feather bonnet, riding in a convertible Cadillac behind Coach Joe Paterno. Indian Joe would grumble at me when I was a kid pestering him on his porch for stories of the old frontier days.

When I asked Mr. Foultz tonight if he knew Indian Joe, and what his real last name was, I received a long and flattering description of Indian Joe.

No, he was not Shawnee, nor Delaware, nor Conestoga, nor Onandaga, nor any other local tribe. Joe was Menominee, from Wisconsin.

Turns out, Old Joe had served in the American Armed Forces, met a young woman in Baltimore, married, and moved back to her home town of Pine Grove Mills. His real last name was something like Gonfer, as it sounded to me.

Pine Grove Mills was also the location of the first girl I had a crush on, Billy Jo. We hunted together as kids, and even then she was beautiful to look at, and kind. She was a hell of a shot, too, and killed deer sooner and faster than I did.

So elderly Mr. Foultz and I went on a memory spree tonight, naming places and people from decades ago. The Artz’s Arco, where I bought my hunting licenses from age twelve through twenty, was where he worked Saturdays as a teenager. And so on. Mind you, dear reader, Pine Grove Mills had a total population of about 250 people back then, and probably a bit more today. Still surrounded by farms and State Forest, it is the epitome of Small Town Pennsylvania, something I regularly celebrate.

So, kind thoughts to old Indian Joe, long gone from his porch and from Joe Paterno PSU homecoming parades down the middle of our quaint town, and sad but good thoughts to Doctor Jerry, whose kind and gentle demeanor will be hugely missed today and for decades to come.

Takeaway? People shape us constantly, from our earliest days to our hoary old age of fifty. It’s good and proper that we should be shaped, and honed, sharper and better, by the people around us, as time marches on.

Garden as metaphor, Part 3…or 4

Can anyone think of a better metaphor for life as a human than a garden?

All the planning, selecting, planting, nurturing, stoking, prodding, coaxing, frustration, re-planting, and finally, after all the work and with some luck, the harvesting of fresh food…this is all just like the bigger things in our lives.

Lately it has been difficult to ignore some generational changes afoot that simply cannot bode well for our nation, now or in the future.

Where debate historically involved logic, facts, and reasoning, a great deal of what is represented as debate is simple ridicule, mockery, dismissiveness.

Few things demonstrate the weakness of an argument more than the use of ridicule and mockery, or name-calling. Yet the Internet is full of this waste of time. Because of my own passion for and involvement in tough policy issues, I am really interested to hear separate points of view from people, and spirited debate, give-and-take, is part of that process. This process is what makes Western Civilization so unique and so precious.

Dismissiveness assumes all will be well, no matter what, irrespective of actions or behaviors across the landscape.

In my observation, the younger generations are much more inclined to forgo logic and facts, and are more inclined to leap into name calling and ridicule in their online debates. This just cannot bode well for American democracy, which is based on the use of logic, reason, and facts. How our citizens expect to hold on to their Constitutional rights and liberties, and yet allow debate to be dominated by juvenile behavior is not wild speculation. Already we have witnessed the erosion of individual liberties at the hands of judges who don’t care what the US Constitution says, or what their particular state constitution says; their basis for decisions making is purely personal, or political.

So go grow a garden, fellow citizens. Tending even a small garden helps us work physical and mental muscles that atrophy easily. It builds small but important personal traits that are needed on a much bigger scale. Tending, cultivating, and nurturing all build basic skills necessary for us to function well as individuals and for our civilization to succeed on the whole.

The alternative – relying on everyone else for everything else we need, and ridiculing the rest – is a recipe for disaster.

Three seats open on the PA Supreme Court, three women to fill them

Rebecca Warren, Cheryl Allen, and Anne Covey are three outstanding people. All are candidates for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. All are attorneys. Cheryl and Anne broke gender barriers to become judges; Cheryl may have broken a skin color barrier. Rebecca is breaking a philosophical barrier that seeks to keep Constitutionalists out of jurisprudence. Note the bizarre role of the PA Bar Association in this election.

All three women I’ve met and spoken to at length, each more than one time. All three impress the heck out of me. They are real people, plenty smart, and plenty experienced. The citizens of our Commonwealth deserve to have these kinds of minds running our legal branch.

I’m voting for all three of these amazing, inspiring women on Tuesday, which is Primary Election Day. Hopefully, you will, too.

Are PA’s vaunted wild turkeys in trouble?

Pennsylvania lead the way reestablishing wild turkey populations back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Well do I recall the grainy film footage of catch-and-release population building during my Hunter Education course in 1974. By 1976 wild turkeys were being successfully hunted in my neck of central Pennsylvania. Twins Jim and Joe Harpster brought to school the impressive long beards and spurs they called in, inspiring me to take a fall hen with my 20-gauge shotgun.
Fast forward a few decades, and a bunch of us up north are now wondering if this past harsh winter decimated the flocks that were brimming with birds just six months ago. After all, I and quite a few other friends in north central PA have hardly heard much less seen turkeys the past two weeks.
And we have all seen plenty of predators, like coyotes and bobcats.
One person told me yesterday there’s talk among the PGC biologists that the regional turkey population may have been knocked back ten years.
Wouldn’t that be a shame?

Hunting…it ain’t about killing

How often do we hear the line “Hunting- it ain’t about killing”?
It’s common because it’s true.
Boy is it good my family isn’t depending upon me for food through hunting…
This spring gobbler season has been very slow up north. It’s as if the turkeys suffered a severe blow from the long winter.
So far I’ve had a pure white coyote run up to me, been stalked by a bobcat that wouldn’t take No for an answer, had a raccoon molest the decoy, nearly been overrun by a sluggish porcupine that wouldn’t take No for an answer, and I’ve been entertained by the antics of a mouse. Watching deer munch on trees I’ve nurtured, well, that’s a different feeling.
One thing about hunting is true: It’s about being out in Nature. Sometimes success there is measured in mouse antics, and not in trophy long beards.
I love it.

Good luck spring gobbler hunting tomorrow

Tomorrow is the spring gobbler hunting season opener here in PA.
People from all around PA and beyond are drawn to our forests and farm fields to try their hand at enticing a strutting long beard into shotgun range. It is probably the hardest form of hunting, because little is left to chance; nearly the entire process depends upon the lone hunter’s skills.

Those skills involve calling, sure, but they also involve understanding a turkey’s habits, its habitat, the local and larger terrain and topography, weather, and the impact of other predators, both human and four-legged on how a gobbler might respond to the seductive crooning of a the faux hen.

Turkey hunting is one of the least productive, most frustrating pastimes possible. And yet it is so popular.

Good luck out there tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen. Be safe (do not stalk turkey sounds), carefully shoot for the gobbler’s neck area between the head and the body, and enjoy the unfolding of springtime all around you as the dawn magically lights up the woods.