Raccoons Are So Cute . . . and Deadly

May 25, 2016May 25, 2016 ~ If You Want My Opinion ~ 2 Comments

What could be more adorable among wild animals than a raccoon? With that signature black mask that looks like a small child dressed for Halloween and that distinctive striped, bushy tail, these waddling mammals are quite often photographed and recorded on video as they make their way through suburban neighborhoods, and even large cities, looking for an easy meal. Considering how adaptive they have become to residential areas and how broad their diet is, most meals are probably fairly easy indeed. They are mostly nocturnal, spending the hours after dusk raiding trash cans or prowling around for frogs and crustaceans. Watching them rub their faces or stand on their hinds legs with their front paws extended forward, observers are lured into thinking that raccoons are practically tame and even friendly. Plenty of people have made pets of young raccoons, and as long as their diet and other environmental conditions are strictly controlled, they are probably harmless for the most part. Nevertheless, the raccoon is not a domesticated species — it is wild. Here lies the problem.

In captivity, raccoons can live up to 20 years; however, in the wild they rarely live more than 3-4 years. That’s quite a significant spread. They have very few natural predators, and humans are not as nearly interested in their pelts as was the case several generations ago (alas, Daniel Boone and Fess Parker have been dead for a while). They are hunted for sport, but not widely. What accounts for the difference? Disease and infection are the greatest threat to longevity for raccoons, and because they share environments with humans, they are a greater risk than most people realize. YouTube is full of videos of raccoons wandering around in backyards, playing in sandboxes, or even swimming in pools. How cute! How dangerous!!

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has an entire section of its website devoted to risks associated with close encounters with raccoons. In addition to rabies, giardia, and leptospirosis, raccoons also spread the Baylisascaris infection from a specific type of roundworm. The roundworm eggs are sometimes found in the feces of raccoons, and if ingested, they can cause a deadly infection. Raccoons need water for digestion, and they also feed on amphibians, so they are naturally drawn to water, even swimming pools. Frogs often gather along the waterline of pools and in the skimmers, which offers a feeding opportunity for raccoons. They are creatures of habit, so once they start visiting a pool and find food, they will likely return. Another habit they have is pooping in water, and they will often do so in the shallow walk-out sections of swimming pools. If the feces is infected, it can introduce roundworm eggs into the water. And the real kicker is this: chlorine doesn’t kill the eggs or the parasite!

It is simply not a good idea to attract raccoons to where people live, especially by intentionally feeding them. Young children have a tendency to place their hands and objects in their mouths, which puts them at significant risk if they are playing in areas where raccoons are roaming around freely. As cute as they are, raccoons are something you want to see on a hike through the forest, not in your backyard.

Evangelicals and the Problem of Free Will

May 20, 2016May 20, 2016 ~ If You Want My Opinion ~ Leave a comment

Having been raised as a Southern Baptist, I was taught from a very early age that the Bible is God’s holy word, that it is infallible, and that it presents humanity with essentially a road map of how to live on earth and how to ensure one’s soul goes to be with God in heaven for all eternity after life on earth is over. The central truth of the Bible is the work of God’s only son, Jesus, on the cross. The only source of salvation and forgiveness of sins is through his death and resurrection. This is still the basic creed of all Christian evangelicals, not just Baptists. As the Christian fundamentalist movement swept through the South in the 1970s, the dogma became more emphatic, especially the concept of the Bible being inerrant. I can remember pastors only half-joking when they stood in their pulpits, held the Bible up over their heads, and said, “I believe every word of this book. Even when it says ‘genuine leather’ on the cover, I believe it!”

Evangelicals believe that God loves his creation and that he also has desires, the strongest of which is for humanity to return his love. Humans express this love by obeying God’s commandments. But, above all, humans demonstrate their devotion to God by believing that Jesus is his only son and that accepting his sacrificial death as atonement for their natural sinful state miraculously repairs the fallen relationship with God (Adam, Eve, rotten fruit, etc.). Again, for evangelicals this part of the plan is crucial. It is only the cleansing power of the blood of Jesus that can bring God and humanity together, which not only empowers humans to obey God’s commandments but also grants their souls an eternity with Jesus, who is actually God in human form just to complicate matters further. The alternative is rejecting God and facing an eternity in hell — complete separation from God with a whole lot of torture, anguish, teeth gnashing, ill-tempered serpents, and the like. God wants humans to love him, and by its very definition, love is something that has to be voluntary. God doesn’t force humans to love him, which wouldn’t be genuine love. Humans have the freedom to either love God or reject him, another key component of the whole arrangement.

Another part of the Baptist training was embracing the perfect nature of God. The Bible is infallible because it is inspired, if not ghost authored, by God himself. God is omnipotent and omniscient — there is nothing God cannot do, although he certainly elects not to do plenty of things. All options are open to him. He knows everything that has ever happened and will happen, past and future. In fact, everything that happens ultimately conforms to God’s will. So even the most mortal sins committed by humanity, although contrary to God’s wishes, eventually fold into the greater plan of God for the universe. God’s will is unavoidable. When I was growing up, it would have been inconceivable that there could be anything that God didn’t already know. The evidence for this concept for evangelicals is found in the Bible in Jeremiah 1:5. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” Putting aside the fact that this verse refers specifically to the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, my fellow Baptists cited this verse as proof that God knows individuals, and individual souls, before they are conceived and born. Remember, time is irrelevant for God. Past, present, and future are all in his command.

Now we come to the problem that is free will. As stated earlier, evangelicals adhere to the principle that God loves humanity and wants his love returned. John 3:16 is probably the most important verse in the entire Bible to evangelicals: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” People are given the option to believe that Jesus is God’s son and that his sacrifice is the source of their salvation and relationship with God. However, it is painfully obvious that millions, if not billions, of people do not accept Jesus as their savior and therefore miss the salvation boat altogether. Which brings us to the troubling question about the true personality of God. If indeed God knows everything, and if he is not constrained by time, and if he knows all that is going to happen, then it reasonably follows that he knows which individuals will return his love and which ones will reject him, before they are even born. Given this premise, it follows that the God who can do anything actually chooses to allow people to be born even though he knows they will ultimately reject him and thus be cursed to an eternity in hell. Is this lais·sez-faire approach the only means by which God can secure the love of humanity? Do billions of people have to be cast into hell to gather a minority of people who will love God, accept his gift of salvation, and share eternity with him?

Evangelicals who adopt this paradigm are faced with a God who is at once all-loving while also being extremely negligent of the majority of those he apparently loves. In the case of humanity’s free will, God is obviously electing not to impose his omnipotence and letting humanity chart its eternal course. Is this a situation where God is simply choosing not to know something? Keeping secrets from himself? If we think about this for more than a minute or two, we must come to terms with a God who is “writing off” a significant portion of the population as damned, when he could have easily spared them an eternity of torment by not allowing them to be born in the first place. As a father, I would do anything within my power to prevent my son from committing suicide, especially if I could ensure that he had a bright future. What kind of father would I be if I didn’t attempt to intervene? Given the same circumstances, most fathers would do the same. If parents could know, without a shadow of a doubt, that they were going to conceive a child who would suffer horrific pain for an entire lifetime, would they elect to have such a child just for the sake of starting a family? Are we more compassionate than God? Free will doesn’t seem like such a valuable gift when we consider the stakes. If this is God’s plan for getting the love he wants, what does this really tell us about God? Something’s missing here. It’s a problem.

Building Ponds and Waterfalls

May 17, 2016May 18, 2016 ~ If You Want My Opinion ~ 3 Comments

Since starting this blog over a year ago, I have written several posts about waterfalls my family has visited in recent years. I am attracted to water. Some of my best memories from childhood through the present involve vacations at the beach, tubing down rivers, kayaking on ponds and lakes, and swimming in pools. There are very few sounds that are more calming to me than waves crashing against the shore. I love the music that water makes as it moves in nature — creeks, rivers, cascades, and falls. I like how water divides land, how it reflects the sky and sparkles like diamonds with bright sunlight. It is cliche to say that water is the source of life, and yet it is an indisputable fact that life on this planet would be impossible without water.

My appreciation for the gifts of water led me to begin contemplating about ten years ago how I could incorporate water into my garden. I had seen ponds at homes and in public places, but I had never thought about creating one for myself. Then I got divorced. When such an emotional life-changing event occurs, some people turn to abusing alcohol, taking drugs, or other reckless behavior. But, I have two sons who were both teenagers when my marriage ended. They needed me to be sober, responsible, and engaged in their lives as much as possible within the limits imposed by the breakup. Besides, addiction is not a problem for me, nor is it how I combat stress, anger, sadness, or any of the other strong feelings that accompany the dissolution of a marriage. I needed a distraction, something that could occupy my mind and muscles while getting me out of the house. So I started digging a hole in the backyard.

It took me several days just to dig the hole, and almost that long to get the sides level. I read books. I watched videos. I drew pictures and diagrams. I had a fairly steep embankment running down the side of my house (I ended up keeping our house) that extended into the fenced back yard and somewhat leveled out beside the posts of the back deck. I envisioned a cascading waterfall built into the bank, where I had planted an assortment of shrubs several years earlier. I consulted with a local landscape supply store about liners, flex hose, pumps, skimmers, and rocks. The rocks I purchased were generally no larger than a honey dew melon, and I didn’t have a lot of money left after buying the mechanical supplies. My property was bordered in the back by woods and a small creek. Fortunately, my younger son was quite enthusiastic about the project as it developed, and was more than willing to help me drag rocks from the creek bed and up the hill to the pond site. We moved a LOT of rocks, some of which were quite large. My back will never be the same. It took several weeks to finish, but the end product was really beautiful. I even bought a few fish to complete the package. Furthermore, the process of building the pond gave me the distraction I desperately needed and an opportunity to spend some quality time with my young teenager when he really needed my attention.

When my second wife and I got married, I moved in with her to a house located on a Georgia Power Company lake. Even before we got married and I moved away from my house, I was already missing my pond. Of course, there were several million gallons of water within a stone’s throw of our back door, and we had huge, clear windows looking out on the large cove where we lived. I could fish in our back yard, climb onto a jet ski right off our dock, and go swimming without leaving home. We were planning to get married on the patio looking out over the lake, and I was determined the sound of running water was going to be the music for our ceremony. I went to work a couple of months before the wedding. This time, I didn’t have a steep slope to work with, so I created a small “hill” for a waterfall using the dirt I removed for the pond. The setting didn’t look as natural as the first pond, but I was able to landscape and plant sufficiently around the perimeter to make this second pond attractive.

Now we have left the lake house behind, along with our former jobs, and have moved to live and work in the north Georgia mountains. I’m not sure my body could have taken the punishment of building a third pond. It is quite grueling, especially digging the hole and then hauling and positioning the rocks. But my wife and I both love water. We seek it when we go on hikes. We soak it up when we make our annual trips to the coast. We spend many hours during the warmer months on nearby lakes cruising around in our kayaks. We needed water at our new home, but there were no streams in sight of our property. So we splurged. We hired someone to build a pond and a waterfall for us at our new home. It took the better part of a summer, but our contractor is an artist. He took great care preparing the location behind our house, even though we were certain there wasn’t enough room for the size project we had in mind. He made it fit, and he made it magnificent. Once again, we are mesmerized by the sound of a cascading waterfall for at least seven months out of the year. True, this third pond doesn’t look quite as authentic or natural as the smaller ones I created, but it has most certainly exceeded all our expectations.

Pool

The Desert Garden

May 11, 2016 ~ If You Want My Opinion ~ Leave a comment

The title of this entry may at first seem like a mistake. “Perhaps he really meant ‘The Dessert Garden,’ which conjures up images of fruit trees.” Most people don’t associate gardens with deserts. By definition, deserts are empty places. They are barren, usually having sandy or rocky soil and little or no vegetation. When we say a place is deserted, we mean it is empty or uninhabited. By contrast, we often think of gardens as lush, green spaces teeming with life. Until I married someone who had lived for almost two decades in the Southwest, I didn’t think I would like spending much time in that region of the country. I don’t mind hot weather that much, especially if the humidity is low. But green is my favorite color, and I love gardening. Nothing grows in a desert, right?

Ridiculous. The desert is full of life, and the diversity of plant species is staggering. There are about 2,000 different kinds of cacti alone. The six cactus genera with the largest number of plants, and hence most likely to be encountered, are cereus, cylindropuntia, echinocereus, ferocactus, mammillaria and opuntia. In addition to cacti, there are grasses, shrubs, trees, and wildflowers. One of the best places to get a clear picture of the desert’s splendor is the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona. With more than 4,000 species and approximately 27,650 individual plants, the Desert Botanical Garden is home to one of the world’s most spectacular living collections of the world’s desert plants.

Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix, Arizona

We spent some time several years ago during a visit to Phoenix to wander through the Garden. Perhaps the most striking feature is the endless forms and shapes that the plants in the desert take. They have evolved over millions of years to take full advantage of the limited resources available, and water conservation dictates so much of the characteristics of desert flora. Flowers tend to be less numerous but so much more striking in color, shape, and size than those found in other environments. The Garden offers permanent trailside exhibits, temporary art exhibitions, and seasonal activities too.

Sometimes it’s difficult to look beyond the familiar and seek the undiscovered, and I certainly found that to be true about the desert. There’s green everywhere! I have visited the Southwest several times now, and I am always ready to return. It is wild, rugged, and even harsh, but it possesses a charm that can be found nowhere else in the country. The Desert Botanical Garden is not to be missed.

Self Portrait with Tree by Jaume Plensa

May 2, 2016May 3, 2016 ~ If You Want My Opinion ~ Leave a comment

Public art is a standard feature in most large cities across the U.S. and in much of the world. Art that is made freely available for everyone to enjoy in public places takes many forms: painting, photography, architecture, sculpture, graffiti, and even performance. Like many tourists, I tend to take photographs of public art when I am visiting cities, and I have collected images from New York, San Francisco, Phoenix, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Rome, and London to name a few. One of the more interesting pieces I found may not be so well known, although the artist is rather prolific. One evening in 2011 when my wife and I were walking the streets of Chicago headed out for dinner, we wondered through a section of the city known as Streeterville, a neighborhood roughly east of the Magnificent Mile that serves as the gateway to the Navy Pier. I was struck by a piece of bronze sculpture we saw at the northern end of Streeterville, at E. Chestnut Street next to the landmark Hancock Center.

When I first saw Jaume Plensa’s “Self Portrait with Tree” on the sidewalk, my first thought was to make a joke, an annoying habit of mine. I turned to my wife and said, “Now that is truly a man of letters.” My apologies — please keep reading. Plensa is one of the featured artists of the Richard Gray Gallery. With its main location on North Michigan Avenue and another on Madison Avenue in New York, Richard Gray Gallery is mostly a collector’s gallery and focuses its attention on attracting buyers. According to the gallery’s website, Plensa is one of the world’s foremost sculptors working in the public space, with over 30 projects spanning the globe in such cities as Chicago, Dubai, London, Liverpool, Nice, Tokyo, Toronto, and Vancouver. He was born in 1955 in Barcelona, where he studied at the Llotja School of Art and Design and at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Art. A significant part of Plensa’s work is in the field of sculpture in the public space. Installed in cities in Spain, France, Japan, England, Korea, Germany, Canada, USA, etc., these pieces have won many prizes and citations, including the Mash Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.

Plensa has used the theme of the seated figure for many installments, and he has repeated the tree-hugging sculpture in various locations around the world. Some of the pieces are colossal. Another thread running through Plensa’s work is the use of letters and symbols to fabricate the figure. For these particular pieces, he works in an assortment of materials including bronze, stainless steel, and stone. The Self Portrait in Streeterville is especially interesting because of the letters in full relief on the seated figure’s body, like the type hammers of an old manual typewriter. The technique lends a bit of nostalgia to the piece. You can learn more about the work of Jaume Plensa at his website at http://www.jaumeplensa.com/.

If You Want My Opinion

Here it is!

Month: May 2016