I found a feather on the drive, a very nice feather contributed by one of the ravens that lives over in the church grounds. I picked it up, deciding our good-luck troll, who collects such things, might have a Spokane raven feather for his collection.
Then I thought: bird flu. West Nile Virus.
And put it down.
And now I think, y’know, I’m going to find that feather and hand it to the troll.
The world isn’t half as dangerous as television watchers believe. Oh, sure, I know a dozen places you can get shot, mugged, infected, or drown quite easily. But Swine Flu, pandemics, Bird Flu, radon gas and free radicals, eat this, don’t eat that, caffeine is good for this and bad for that, ditto red wine, white wine….
Y’know, when I was a kid, I dipped my fingers in hot tar, just to get some free ‘bubble gum’. Works. We collected liquid mercury out of broken thermometers and played with it. We danced in the spray of the DDT trucks trying to eliminate the mosquitos that were carrying something brought in from overseas-returning military. We ate snow-ice-cream, until it became radioactive. We went trick or treating into strangers’ houses. We ran the streets at night. We were, perhaps, the people others worried about. I went to a rough junior high and guns were common in the student population—they had search-desks in the halls and did random stops, picking up a whole arsenal of lovely things, zip guns, real guns, you name it. I walked through gang turf daily. I hiked alone, as a teen, through wildlife parks. I grew up playing on an old firing range with unexploded ordnance that turned up now and again, once lethally…so I kind of know what risk is. I rode a bike with no helmet and all our wiring was cloth-wrapped and our fuses, yes, sometimes used pennies. I was frequently exposed to whooping cough, and polio, pre-vaccine. We had only the most rudimentary refrigeration: it wouldn’t keep ice cream hard. And we ate potato salad that had been out all day and even overnight, on spring nights. It was probably colder than the fridge. We never refrigerated butter, jams, often not cheese, usually didn’t refrigerate leftover fried chicken or pork chops, just had it on the counter…it would disappear within two days. And I am still in one piece and healthy.
So now the internet and the news can inform us of the latest plague before it arrives, and we spook out, lather ourselves with alcohol gels, worry about our free radicals while wolfing down supersized Big Macs, and enough idiots are willing to order Tamiflu and Viagra lookalikes from the internet and pop this stuff in their mouths without question…they must be making money offering this stuff, since my mailbox is flooded hourly with offers…we hear about a home invasion on the telly and everybody in smalltown America checks their door locks. We hear about some trick or treat incident and every parent in America restricts their kids to their block, their neighbors. We have a mindset where a person sues a riding stable because a horse threw them, or a playground because they fell off the jungle gym. Hey, I learned not to walk under the supersized teeter-totters. One headache was enough for me. I never fell off the merry-go-round, but I was dragged a few rounds when I missed: I learned that great lesson—make up your mind where you’re going to land or don’t let go. I also learned you will not die of a skinned knee. And if you get one, hey, just pour a mercury compound on it, and you’ll be fine.
My dear friends, I think we run just a wee bit too scared. We get too much information and internalize it much too closely: it’s become the phobia of the week…so heck, yes, I’m going back to my bad old ways. Well, minus the mercury (though it’s great for one really odd thing: hangnails, and I have one bottle in stash that has lasted me for, oh, thirty years.) And I do refrigerate potato salad. And I wash the veggies.
But I maintain we are not half as fragile as the panic-of-the-day news reports would have us think.
1) You forgot to mention mer⋅cu⋅ro⋅chrome.
2) I still have 29,400 surgical masks stockpiled, if you would like any.
Did you actually chew the tar? Somehow, based on the smell, I can’t think that tasted good.
I agree… I grew up not doing quite as much of that stuff as you, since I apparently lived in a better neighborhood. But in summer me and my brothers left the house at dawn and came back for lunch and dinner and bed. With no cell phone to keep tabs on us! We explored miles of storm drains with home-made torches (which taught us a little about making torches, mostly that it’s not as easy as you would think).
And both my parents worked once we were all in school, so if we got ill we would stay at home. By ourselves. If I recall correctly, mom would call at lunch. At 6,7, and 8, my parents didn’t think twice about leaving us alone in a hotel in a strange town for the day. Granted, they thought we were going to eat there, not go off looking for a Burger Chef, but we found it, got our food, and got back with no harm done.
And when I was 5, my parents thought nothing of letting me go play in the park a block away on my own. Or about leaving me at home while they went shopping. I think about now, and realize that my parents would probably get child protective services called on them if they did half the things that they used to do.
And, to be honest, part of the problem is television (and the internet, now). The news will do “late-breaking” stories around the clock on the latest terror of the day, even if they don’t have any new information. Studies show that being bombarded that way makes people more nervous, and that limiting the amount of time you spend listening about the newest threat is the best thing to do.
When I was a kid in San Francisco in the 50s I rode my bike all over the place including over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito. My friends and I had no organized sports-we lived in the high rent area-so we organized our own tackle football and baseball-hardball, no softball-and played on the fields of our neighborhood playground. No permit or anything. I took the bus alone all over The City including to thed\ Harding Theater, not in the nicest area-for the triple horror bill on Saturday afternoons. I made black powder with my friends and blew things up. Later I got into shooting and loaded my own ammunition in my early teens. A 13 year old going to the sporting goods store and buying gunpowder today would draw the SWAT unit.
It’s a different world today and I’m not sure the cotton wool we now wrap youngsters in is the best thing for them.
Phil Brown
its a sadder place too, no real adventures for kids, just video games .. 🙁
and Ravens, wonderful creatures! I just read Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds
by Bernd Heinrich, absolutely fascinating. we don’t have them in this very uncraggy corner of the UK, but I see a pair on my crags in Spain every day in the winter.
I totally agree about our over-cautious modern age.
On swine flu, it’s good to bear in mind that well over 100 people *per day* die of *ordinary* flu in the USA, and about 1500 per day globally.
Swine flu deaths for the USA are a total of 170 in about 2.5 months, or just over 2 per day in that period, and globally there have been a total of 382 swine flu deaths to date.
i.e. Swine flu deaths are trivial in number compared to ongoing deaths from ordinary flu all the time. If 100 people per day were dying from swine flu, rather than ordinary flu, people would be having hysterics.
Also, globally 89,921 cases of swine flu have been recorded, leading to 382 deaths. This means that even if you catch swine flu, your chance of dying is about 0.4%. Or to put it another way, you have a 99.6% chance of recovering with no long-term effects.
The real epidemic is an epidemic of irrational fear. So who benefits from fear about swine flu? The pharmaceutical companies and the media…
On a totally different subject, I think that the many cat-lovers here (in which I include myself) will enjoy the following BBC article:
Cats ‘exploit’ humans by purring
“Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans.
Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a “soliciting purr” to overpower their owners and garner attention and food.
Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a “cry”, with a similar frequency to a human baby’s.”
The rest of the article, and a video, can be found at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8147566.stm
The problem with the swine flu is that it has a chance of mutating faster and in worse directions than ordinary flu, and the chances are that the wave of winter flu will be worse than what we’re seeing now. Also, like previous nasty flus, people at risk from death are young and healthy, as opposed to old and with underlying health problems.
People who know what they’re talking about are worried, and they have convincing arguments, so don’t shrug it off. We’re already seeing resistant strains, which is not making me happy, either. I don’t think we should panic – but we should definitely monitor it closely.
Resistent bugs is something I *do* worry about: Darwin in action, and the western world is being Nature. We run get an antibiotic for every little infection. We half-take a prescription. We breed better and better bugs.
Epsom salts for a topical works pretty well. So does aloe.
Also, to be fair, the initial reports on swine flu came from areas with, shall we say, underdeveloped health care systems, thus skewing the initial statistics to look worse than they wound up being. If you’ve only heard of 50 cases of the new strain and all 50 die, that looks really bad until you find out about the 500 other cases that didn’t go to a doctor because they didn’t feel bad enough to justify the expense.
Amen.
I quite agree. Although one shouldn’t forget that the hazards reported in the media are every bit as great as they say. The problem is that the risk is quite low. Swine flu fior example has killed a few people. Will it kill you? depends on a huge range of factors – and this is true for all the other topics you listed. I’m never sure whether reporters are incapable of understanding complicated issues, or deliberately simplify them because they assume (ass u me) their audience can’t understand complications.
Green Wyvern – if I recall Correctly, ordinary flu has about 0.1% mortality, hence by your sums swine flu is 4x more deadly. This is why people are right to be concerned… up to a point.
“the hazards reported in the media are every bit as great as they say. The problem is that the risk is quite low.”
Very well stated. It’s not that the danger isn’t real. The danger of a comet the size of New Jersey hitting our planet would be 100%—very! The *incidence* of such a strike is not worth sitting there staring at the skies in apprehension all our lives.
And ordering anti-comet umbrellas and tinfoil hats off the internet sure won’t help!
I think what is happening more and more is that all practices get shoved to the unsafe end of things. Because, really: riding your bike on a freeway, walking on railway tracks, inhaling DDT, home-made fireworks and reaching into hot tar? Not good ideas for any given person and at any point in time, and children need to be discouraged from those things. Even if they managed to survive.
A lot of other stuff falls into the ‘evaluate your risks’ category, and this, really, is where kids need to learn those skills. Unfortunately, kids have no sense of self-preservation, and a thirteen-year-old might think nothing of riding through the McDonals drive-through at rush hour… but her parents will, rightly have kittens at the idea. The conclusion is that the kid needs better boundaries of what is and isn’t ok for her to do – ok to hack out around the lanes (bridleways being in short supply – still more danger than one would like to expose one’s kid to), not ok to go on the main road, much less during rush hour. OK to do some things when you tell people where you go, not ok to do the same stuff without telling anyone.
That whole category of ‘take precautions and hope for the best’ is important to reach adulthood safely. At some point, a child will have to cross a road on their own. So you better teach them when they’re young, and control their environment as well as you can, and pray nothing will happen.
And then there is, as you said, a whole category of things that fall under ‘don’t make a fuss’- skinned knees and picking up a bisquit that fell on the floor, dusting it off, and eating it.
The jury is still out whether going overbard with antibacterial stuff is bad for you, but I know what I believe.
What scares me is what happens to the next generations? Safety is basic and preventing injuries is not a bad thing. Are we creating a society that will be extremes? At one end my Mother with “It’s not safe for girls to …..” and at the other, those parents who just don’t care what happens to their children? Yes, this already exists, but I’m talking about a widening of the gap in between. Increases at the extremes. Instead of a bell curve, a horseshoe. I’m thinking in terms of behavior and health.
On a related tangent, The American Plague by Molly Caldwell Crosby, reads like a novel and is the history of the malaria epidemics that decimated Memphis, TN. The reviewers on Amazon do a better job than I can, but I enjoyed reading it from the library so much that I bought a copy on a clearance table.
Awesome post. And OnionSlaveGirl, you slay me.
♠Without the bitter hand of experience most people -adult or child- seldom learn. It is just not important. Being wrapped ion cotton wool and hedged in with “don’ts” children never acquire any street smarts, and if they are ever learned its less likely that they will be at the level of near instinct.
I also worry what that protected, watch the electronics in the safe living room upbringing is doing to the development of imagination.
Most kids raised in that manner are unlikely to seek out the unfenced outdoors for recreation when they grow up. For that matter look at all the grown up idiots that do go on a hike and get into stupid trouble, and then have to use their CELL PHONES to call for help.
Hey, their cell phones at least allow them *to* call for help. I haven’t seen the statistics, but I would think it’s cutting the deaths we get. I live not too far from one of the most dangerous and deadly environments on the planet: the British hills. They’re deceptively close to civilisation, and deceptively civilised – not high mountains, rounded and harmless-looking, and never *that* far from a road. People go for strolls in shorts and without taking water all the time. And most of them return to the car half an hour later.
Some don’t. Some get lost in fogs or step into bogs or fall over cliffs, and when you’re dressed for a summer day and get a frosty night, you can be in trouble real soon. We now have a relatively comprehensive cell phone coverage, and people can just call for help, and do. They’re no more stupid than their parents’ suburban generation, they just have an extra tool to get out of trouble.
But overall I agree with your comment. I live in a village where the children still play out, and long may it last, but I worry that if we don’t get them into the habit of exercising and playing games and just messing about outside on their bikes, they won’t develop those habits when they’re older.
::laughs:: I think you’re right. You need to pick your worries. After all, more people die in car accidents every day than from swine flu or bird flu.
Me? I have a recipe:
Put a chicken, yes a whole one, skin and all, into the pot. Cover with water. Toss in 2 carrots, 2 sticks of celery, and one quartered onion. Boil until chicken falls off bone.
Leave pot on stove over night to cool.
Bone chicken. Strain the rest. (Strainer gives you murky broth, cheese cloth will give you clearer broth).
Toss chicken, stock, diced carrots, diced celery, diced onions into the pot, and bring to a boil. Preheat oven 350F.
Make biscuits with lots of eggs. Carefully lay those on top of the broth. Cover tightly, and bake 45 minutes. Remove lid and bring oven up to 425 to brown biscuits.
Notice that the stock sits at room temp overnight. I used to freak my roomie with that. But I have never once gotten sick with this recipe.
OSG, mercurochrome? That was for sissies, my mom used merthiolate – that stung!!!!
We lived about 2 blocks from an area of town you did NOT go to, this being the 1950s, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so the divisions were still there. I remember riding bikes clear out about a half-mile from home, in a new subdivision, where the challenge was to be able to climb the hill. We had our friends one day, who were enemies next day, then friends again the next day. There was so much to do without having to resort to artificial means of entertainment. We had big water balloon fights, we’d shoot off water powered rockets, we had sparklers (oh my, you might burn yourself!). My parents rule was that we had to be home when the streetlights came on. A fair rule, since that signaled dark, time for young’uns to be home. Dirty? Oh yes, sweaty? definitely, and there were all those nasty cuts from running around barefoot, falling off bikes, going off on our own. Oh, I did my exploring, which got me 7 cracks with the black belt, because it was along a railroad spur that took us out through the woods to the “new” highway (Interstate 75).
Gee, I must have grown up warped, or all that DDT has skewed my perception.
I agree with Pence – there comes a point where you have to let them go. Cheetah mothers in the wild have to leave their cubs to hunt. Foxes are the same way. What about Mama Bunny? We’re all vulnerable, but does that mean we should be paranoid about it? I don’t think so.
As Jim Morrison of The Doors said, “Nobody gets out of here alive.”
I love it! You forgot the “gentian violet” which was another cure-all. As well as catching live cicadas I spent a lot of time down at the ferry wharves (we lived within walking distance of 2), or down at one of the many parks. Once I had passed the swim test at school (everyone in school had to do it) I could go swimming at any of three beaches that had shark enclosures. Two of them involved a bus ride – I could always walk and spend the fare – and the third I could walk to but it wasn’t worth going to unless the tide was high and I learnt to read the tide tables at a young age. This one was local, no life guards, just a net across an inlet in the harbour to keep the sharks out. This was also where I learned which jellyfish won’t sting when you pick them up to throw at someone. Laundry blueing was good for bluebottle stings. The Portuguese Man-o-Wars we didn’t go near. I also remember storm drains, playing in the bamboo down the street where the boys had made a network of tunnels, getting at least one tick a year in my scalp, and living up in some of the enormous Moreton Bay figs.
Thank you for your rant today….I couldn’t agree with you more! We were also the roving band of kids on our beloved Manchester Drive that went outdoors after a breakfast of sugared cereal and didn’t return until the sun was sinking into Lake Hefner, regardless how hot it was. Somebody had pitchers of Kool-Aid or Freezer Pops for us to rehydrate with. I still drink out of the water hose, don’t you? We are stronger for it. My son survived 140 degree heat in Iraq and my daughter slept in the Bush in Africa. When did we become a Chicken Little Society?
Good old Manchester, near the rocketship water tower: we were about the 3rd house from May Avenue on the south side. I used to ride at the stables that was over near the lake where—I think it’s Lakehurst now stands. That was such a nice little net of trails. Now it’s all suburbia.
I refuse to buy antibacterial cleaning products, on principal. Our homes need to be clean…they do NOT need to be sterile. Since most of our nastiest illnesses come from viruses anyway, why raise a generation of kids whose immune systems have never met enough bacteria to enable their defenses to handle it when they DO meet something nasty? I find it funny how as our cleaning standards go up, so do the instances of allergy and asthma…ew, the real world touched me…
I just saw something on “orthorexia,” which is a set of symptoms that result in somebody being obsessed with health food, diets, etc. One lady almost died of malnutrition from all the conflicting diet advice out there until she finally decided that none of it was healthy and became anorexic and stopped eating altogether. YIKES! Classic example of internalizing all the hoopla out there.
A healthy awareness of real danger is good, I think – you know, the criminal elements, and looking out for yourself when you’re alone, etc. The rest of that stuff needs to be chucked into the ‘moderation’ bin.
Adrianne, don’t you think that 45 minutes at 350 has something to do with not leaving that lovely chicken & dumplings dinner in the bathroom much too soon? 😀 Though I often leave batches of soup/chili/whatever overnight to cool, even out in the garage, albeit in winter when it gets quite cold in there. My wife the RN and I definitely believe in exposure to Bad Agents as a way of keeping the old immune system revved up and working.
Jeff
When I was at girl’s camp, in tents in the woods, we had a spooky couple of acres of woodland to cross to get between the old oil tank we used as a swimming pool and the tents of the camp…
It was spooky out there, and this was just around the time a nutcase had pulled a one man? raid on a Girl Scout camp in the county—pretty grim stuff. It did *not* stop us from our camp. And the sheriff’s deputy came and slept on a cot in the main cabin nightly, after that had happened. But he only came in about midnight.
Meanwhile we had this woods to cross. I declined to use a flashlight. Why tell a prowler where you are, when you know every trail? So I made that run every night.
One night we woke up with searchlights playing over the tents. One of our number ran the creekbottom to get to the alarm bell, a real bell, on its pole. The rest of us grabbed our hatchets (they locked up the bows nightly) and other items of destruction and scattered into the woods edge.
The alarm bell sounded. The neighboring farm called the sheriff, who showed up with lights blazing, and all us in our babydoll pj’s, hatchets in hand, were treated to the embarrassment of a posse of coonhunters out on the road who were now surrounded by sheriff’s deputies and guns. They maintained they were just curious what the tents were over by the creek. They found out.
If “Jason” had shown up, he’d have been diced up and fed to the catfish before the sheriff got there. If they hadn’t had the bows locked up, our coonhunters could have needed rescue. 😉
Those were the days!
By the way, I reclaimed that raven feather, and the troll has it.
I would like to hear more about the good-luck troll. Please tell us all about him.
I am pretty sure we have one too. Who else would have collected all the feathers, fairystones, turtle shells, snail shells, prime slices of mica, and so on? Well, maybe I helped a little.
As a child, my friends and I were free-range kids as many here have described. Most summer days we were outside early, and not expected back until 5:00 for supper. In actual distance, we were probably not ever more than half a mile away, but in our imaginations we were anywhere and everywhere.
We have a little troll figure made of hemp, broomstraw, and acorns, who has a braided hemp tail, and wild hair: he stands a little short of a foot tall, and when we find something wondrous, we add it to his hair. He has a bluejay feather, various oddments, just neat things you find and can’t think otherwise what to do with, but are too good to let the wind and the rain have. I recommend making one if you can’t find one, and using him as a repository of all the wonderful things that would otherwise just get lost.
Now he has pieces of Oklahoma AND Washington!
I recall reading an article about crows and ravens, (family Corvidae?). You can tell the difference in the appearance of the tail. Crows have a rounded tail, while ravens have a squared-off tail. both species are considered to be quite affectionate to their mates, which is why I deplore crow hunting in Ohio. I don’t care how noisy they are, I still see the corn come up in the spring, ears form and grow, and in the fall, the guys get a decent crop, and the crows? I don’t know that they DO eat the corn off the cob. Living on a farm makes me less prone to damage the ecosystem, because now it’s all around me, and I try to have the right attitude about it.
I was lucky to grow up on the edge of the Emerald Necklace, a chain of Metroparks between Cleveland and Akron. In the summer, I could hike several miles away from home, up and down the gullies that edged the Cuyahoga River. I knew what poison ivy and oak looked like, and the best cure if you got into it by accident (jewelweed sap). I saw deer, muskrat, hawks and other birds, foxes, skunks (not too close) and groundhogs. I learned what wild ginger looks like, and goldenseal, and jack in the pulpit, and dug up some to plant at home. I found waterfalls, the remnants of old buildings and locks along the canal, and just how far you could get onto the vivid green grass that covered the marsh before you started sinking. Usually, I left my house around 9 a.m., and returned in the late afternoon. I don’t know how many parents these days would let their kids have that much freedom.