Leave the ditches for wild things

Walnut trees in my hollow have finally leafed out, always the last to do so. Most of their energy is concentrated on forming new seeds, not on greenery. Years ago my father pronounced an ancient walnut tree near the house “dead” because it was early May and there were no leaves. He was wrong about a lot of stuff.

In the past week I have witnessed dozens of incidents of what bird people call “mobbing,” a behavior in which smaller birds attack and chase much larger birds away from the vicinity of their nests. Birds eat other birds and larger predators like hawks and eagles are happy to make lunch of newborn chicks. My heart paused a few days back when an American bald eagle arose from a ditch in grand fashion just ahead of my car, being chased by a red-winged blackbird. As a road cyclist I can attest to the tenacity of red-winged blackbirds, birds that will threaten and attack anything traveling near the nests they construct in the ditches.

Out here there are laws written in which county secondary roads departments are supposed to hold off mowing ditches until after nesting season. You can about guess how that goes. I say leave the ditches alone. Wildlife habitat is shrinking at an alarming rate as we make room for more crops and, for reasons I cannot fathom, we insist upon manicuring the world. Leave the ditches to the wild things.

I was never a lone bicyclist, always traveling with a hard-core cyclist, my wife, a woman who rode that big across-the-state circus a number of times before determining that it was becoming less a ride, and more a party. So we rode together, glorious summer after glorious summer, just the two of us, until she could pedal no more. Out here in the far country I’m planning to ride this year for the first time in a very long time. Alone. Six years ago a high school classmate and friend was riding backcountry roads in a county north of here, had a major heart attack, and breathed his last, alone on a beautiful Sunday in April, no one by his side. I will let someone know when I’m on the road.

Last night I was rereading a book I’ve read every year since I was twelve, Ray Bradbury’s sweet story about growing up, Dandelion Wine. Luna was curled up on an Icelandic blanket next to me, rays from the setting sun reached through the windows, shimmering through a glass of whiskey at my side, and the big coyote I’ve been seeing around here trotted across the field in front of my house. It was a terrific moment, deserving of a jazz lick by, oh, I don’t know, Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie.

On a graveled road just to the south of me someone must have lost a glove and someone else kindly put it on a post, so that it can be reclaimed. I had to stop and ponder the thing for a moment, a scene from another world, a hand reaching from the earth, fingers apart, ready to grab something, or catch something. I’m not going to stretch this and attach some special meaning to the scene, as there isn’t any. Not for me, anyway. Nothing about how we are always reaching for something, or about things that will always be just beyond our grasp. Nah, it was none of those things, just an old glove on a steel post out in the middle of nowhere, something that gave me pause on a quiet spring afternoon.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. His book “The Iowa State Fair” is available from the University of Iowa Press.