Thunder Bay, Ontario – I’m sitting on the Hillcrest Park stone wall overlooking the city where I was born and raised. The view of Lake Superior and the Sleeping Giant is magnificent, as always.

So are the memories. Except for one.

I can see into downtown and the side street that once housed my favourite pool room. That brings a painful memory.

I was leaving the pool hall one day in the early 1960s when the air raid siren began blaring. Canada’s national defence department had installed air raid sirens in strategic cities across the country to alert citizens of a nuclear attack. Those were Cuban missile crisis-Cold War times.

We had been told that when we heard the air raid siren we should take cover wherever we could find it. I dived under a bus stop bench down the street from the pool room.

The siren was just a test, but finding cover was considered good practice for the real event.

The air raid sirens were dismantled in the 1970s because missile technology was so advanced that a strike could occur 15 minutes after launch, instead of four hours in the 1960s.

So here we are 50 or 60 years later, once again hearing nuclear strike threats.

Earlier this month the New York emergency management office released a short online video showing New Yorkers the steps they should take if “the big one has hit.”

Emergency officials said the likelihood of a nuclear attack is “very low,” but if so, why release a video telling people what to do when a mushroom cloud obliterates the city?

The fact is that chances of a nuclear attack are increasing rapidly.

Sad Vlad Putin, the lunatic with his finger on the nuclear buttons, said the other day that he will “make use of all weapon systems available” if need be. “This is not a bluff,” he added.

“The horsemen of the apocalypse” are on their way, the equally crazy Dmitry Medvedev, said recently. Medvedev is a former Russian prime minister, now a security council chief.

He also says Russia’s nuclear doctrine does not require it to be struck first before launching its own nuclear warheads.

Russia is said to have 6,000 nuclear warheads, the world’s largest nuclear bomb stockpile. Threats of using them have increased as Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine has heightened his humiliation over how badly it has gone for him.

Putin is a kleptocrat and trained killer who has a reputation for becoming more vicious the tighter he is pushed into a corner. The fear is that if he is pushed much farther, he will make good on the threats.

“I fear that they will strike back now in really unpredictable ways,” Rose Gottemoeller, a former deputy secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),” told the BBC recently. “And ways that may even involve weapons of mass destruction.” Some commentators say nuclear strikes would be only with dialed down tactical nuclear weapons. The experts call these non-strategic weapons because they don’t take out large cities and kill millions in surrounding areas.

As I sit staring out over the city and the 30 kilometres of water separating the downtown and the rocky Sleeping Giant peninsula, I recall the legend of Nanabijou.

The local Indigenous people referred to the Sleeping Giant as Nanabijou. They said Nanabijou guarded a silver-rich little island known as Silver Islet.

If any intruders tried to reach the island to dig its valued silver, Nanabijou would awaken and roar with thunder, toss lightning bolts and blow destructive winds.

These were warnings that invading Nanabijou’s territory to steal the silver would mean certain death.

Stealing the valuable silver from the little island the Giant protects, is an issue no longer. But I like to think that when the Giant throws a summer tantrum across Thunder Bay, it is warning of something bad to happen.

Nanabijou’s roar is still loud and shrill, its lightning bolts still sharp and the winds still powerful enough to whip Lake Superior into giant waves.

When the nukes start flying – non-strategic or not – Nanabijou will still be around to roar. The trouble is, no one will be left to listen.

And so begins the annual invasion of the mice.

They are on the move, searching for cracks and gaps in homes, cottages, garages, sheds and other buildings where they can find rent-free room and board for the coming winter. 

Early reports indicate an invasion of epic proportions.

Most years, people will have one or two mice show up as the weather cools in September and October. At my place, we have evicted 15 of the sneaky little critters in the past 10 days.

Some New England states are reporting increased sightings following large mouse outbreaks in the last two years. A University of Rhode Island mammalogy class reported trapping and releasing 24 mice in one night. Their capturing for study purposes typically gets only six mice a night.

On the other side of the world, Australians are concerned that an invasion that started in 2020 is continuing. By late last year, they were calling it a mice plague that had grown into the “many millions.”

Researchers say warming temperatures and milder winters have allowed mice populations to increase. They say our Great Lakes region has warmed almost two degrees Celsius since 1970.

Last winter was relatively mild, allowing more mice to survive and to keep reproducing. Experts say that female mice can begin having babies just 30 days after their own birth, and can produce three or four broods of four to eight babies every year.

Another factor is a banner year for acorns, a favourite food of mice. The warm summer with little rain has had acorns falling earlier than usual.

All this has created a well-fed and healthy mouse population that has become a robust baby-making factory.

And now, they are all looking for comfortable winter lodgings inside our buildings. Why the early start when the weather is unusually fine and outside food plentiful, no one seems to know.

There is the usual weather folklore that says an early autumn mice invasion means an early and harsh winter. The Farmers’ Almanac is forecasting a record cold winter with record snowfalls in Ontario and Quebec.

Keeping the mice out of your home or cottage is a near impossible chore. They squeeze through the smallest cracks that are difficult to find and seal.

Some people try chasing them out with electric plug-in units that emit high-pitched signals. An old-fashioned deterrent is to leave cotton swabs soaked in peppermint in areas where mice or mice droppings have been seen.

You also can hire one of the professional rodent control companies, whose numbers have grown significantly in the last few years. The North American rodent control market was valued at $1,596.2 million in 2020 and is expected to grow even more in coming years.

There are good reasons to keep the little critters out of your buildings. Health and safety are two good ones.

Mice transmit dangerous diseases such as Lyme disease and Hantavirus. They do not have to bite you to infect you.

Mice are natural reservoirs for Lyme disease bacteria. Black-legged ticks that feed on mice can become infected, then pass it on to humans when they bite and burrow to get a blood meal.

Hantaviruses occupy mice urine, droppings and saliva and can be spread through the air.  They are easily breathed in during vacuuming or sweeping, especially in confined areas.

There is no known cure for Hantavirus and the death rate for persons infected is about 40 per cent. 

However, Hantavirus cases are rare. Canadian health agencies report only three or four cases a year.

Still, it is a deadly virus that must be taken seriously. Health officials advise wearing rubber or plastic gloves and using a disinfectant when cleaning areas occupied by mice.

Aside from posing health risks, mice also are a cause of house fires. They gnaw almost everything and electrical wires seem to be a favourite. When they chew through cable protective covering, they expose bare wires and cause sparking which can start a fire.

If you find a crack or hole where mice might get in, fill it with steel wool, then caulk it to ensure it stays in place.

Mice are good for the environment – out in the wild, not in any of our buildings.

 This week marks a special anniversary. It’s of little interest to anyone but me, but I’m writing about it anyway.

Sixty years ago this week I walked into the second-floor newsroom of The Sault Ste. Marie Daily Star and was assigned a desk as its newest journalist.

I got there through a skillful piece of deception. 

I was passing through Sault Ste. Marie, where my mother lived, enroute to visit an uncle, who was a reporter at The Sudbury Star. The hope was that he would get me a reporting job in Sudbury.

“Why drive to Sudbury?” my mother asked. “The Sault Star is looking for a young reporter. It was in yesterday’s paper.”

Off to the newspaper I went and was greeted in the newsroom by a woman who turned out to be the Women’s Editor and a member of the Curran family who owned the paper.

“Someone gave you bad information,” she said. “We specifically advertised for a young woman to work in our women’s section.”

I was mortified. I flushed red and stammered. She turned away me from but instead of returning to her desk, she went to talk to a stern-looking gentleman at the main news desk.

“I don’t need anyone who looks like a scared little rabbit,” he replied when, pointing at me, she asked if he needed a new reporter.

She said she had a good feeling about me, and so it was that a couple days later I took my place in that newsroom.

No sooner did I get seated than everyone in the newsroom got up and left. Did I smell? Or, was this to protest my hiring? I learned later that the first edition deadline had just passed and everyone went to the coffee room for morning break.

I was left alone in the newsroom except for a sleepy looking guy bent over the wire desk, where national and international news chattered incessantly on The Canadian Press (CP) and United Press International (UPI) teletype printers.

I walked over, introduced myself and asked how he liked working there.

“Beh, beh, beh ter ter tha. . . an . . . ,“ he stuttered. I can’t tell you the rest because it was pornographic, obscene and simply not very nice.

He was drinking from a coffee cup, which I noticed was half filled with a clear white liquid, which was not water.

There have been many changes in the news industry in the 60 years since. Some good. Some bad.

Hundreds of newspapers have closed in the past 10 years and thousands of journalists have lost their jobs. Many news operations now are controlled by companies more interested in revenue and balance sheets than good journalism. 

More people now get their news and information from non-reliable sources such as social media platforms. We live in a broken media environment polluted by toxic talk, rumours, misinformation and disinformation.

Hopefully, this is just a phase and changes are coming that will fix the fractured media environment. There are signs already that news consumers are becoming more aware of, and concerned about, the dangers presented by the decline in fact-based news and information.

It’s not likely that we will see the return of the days of families sitting and reading in-depth newspaper stories. But, maybe growing concern about fractured media will result in positive changes.

One thing that should never change is the lesson learned in my early Sault Star days: The role of the reporter is to observe and report. Accurately, honestly and fairly. To produce news stories that are balanced and put into context.

Good journalism is not about awards, citations or wearing an Order of Canada pin on your lapel. Good reporters leave their egos at the newsroom door. 

The only thing that matters is the story and getting it right. 

Helen Thomas, a UPI reporter for 57 years, said many years ago:

“We don’t go into journalism to be popular. It is our job to seek the truth and put constant pressure on our leaders until we get answers.”

That was a good day 60 years ago this week. The payroll clerk who came to my desk to enrol me as an employee later became my wife.

The world is on the move again after 2 1/2 years of Covid. I'm itching to do some travelling but can't decide where to go.

I’ve considered Tasmania to see the ancient Huon Pine trees, some of which were growing at the time of Julius Caesar. 

I’ve also considered visiting Newfoundland’s quaint coastal towns to see the icebergs moving down the coast. The province’s television ads are spectacular.

And, it would fun to visit Italy’s Tuscany region to take in the beautiful scenery and sample the great Italian foods.

There are many choices, but I think I’ll go to Missouri. 

Missouri?

Missouri indeed. There’s a neat little town in Missouri called Marshall, roughly 300 kilometres (180 miles) west of St. Louis. It is an unimportant place with a population of only 13,000, but it does have two things of special interest for me.

First, one of my grandsons is going to school there. He is in his first year of college, playing baseball for the Missouri Valley College Vikings. (Vikings? In Missouri, the absolute heartland of the US?)

Secondly, Marshall is the home of Jim the Wonder Dog, whose bronze statue stands in the memorial park named after him a short walk from the college.

Jim the Wonder Dog was an English setter said to possess remarkable powers of prediction. He reportedly could predict the sex of unborn children and picked the winners of the Kentucky Derby seven years in a row. He also predicted the New York Yankee victory in the 1936 World Series.

In 1930, Van Arsdale wrote on pieces of paper the names horses expected to run in the Kentucky Derby. He spread the papers in front of Jim, who sniffed them, then placed a paw on one. The piece Jim selected was sealed in an envelope and opened after the race was run.

Seven years in a row, the papers Jim selected bore the name of the winning horse.

Jim was born in 1925 of pureblood champion stock and was given as a gift to hunter Sam Van Arsdale. Jim was the runt of the litter and Van Arsdale’s hunting friends bought him for less than one-half the price of his litter mates and gave Sam the dog as a joke.

Van Arsdale and Jim did a lot of hunting, with the hunter boasting he shot 5,000 birds over Jim, then stopped counting.

On one hunt, Van Arsdale said to Jim: “Let’s go over and rest under that hickory tree.” Jim immediately went to a hickory tree and sat.

Surprised, Van Arsdale then told Jim to go to a walnut tree, then a cedar, then a tin can lying on the ground. Jim went to each quickly and accurately.

Van Arsdale discovered that Jim could locate a car by colour, or licence number. He also could select people from a crowd after being told to find the man who sells hardware, or find the one who takes care of sick people.

Jim even followed commands given to him in foreign languages, Morse Code or shorthand.

News of Jim’s unique talents spread and he was invited to demonstrate them in other towns and other states. Magazines, including Outdoor Life, wrote articles about him.

Some folks suspected Jim was a scam so Van Arsdale brought him to Dr. A. J. Durant, a well-known veterinarian and head of the University of Missouri veterinary school.

Jim was examined and other vets, two psychiatrists and vet students watched as the dog was given commands to locate or identify things. He passed the tests with flying colours.

Dr. Durant, who expected to uncover a scam, concluded that Jim “possessed an occult power that might never come again to a dog in many generations.”

One day in the spring of 1937 when Jim was 12, Van Arsdale took the dog out in a wooded area near a lake. Jim jumped out of the car, ran a short distance, then collapsed. Van Arsdale rushed him to an animal hospital where he died.

Jim’s headstone is the most visited site in Marshall’s Ridge Park Cemetery. 

I think I’ll pass on Tasmania’s tall trees, and Tuscany’s delicious foods, and head on down to Missouri.

#

 

 That voice is in my head again. It sneaks in every August; a throbbing, melancholy voice sighing sad words about loss and change.

“All the rainbows in the sky

Start to weep and say goodbye

You won’t be seeing rainbows anymore.

“Setting suns before they fall, echo to you that’s all, that’s all

“It’s over. It’s over. It’s over.”

It’s the voice of the legendary Roy Orbison coming through the car radio. He’s singing goodbye to a girlfriend who has broken his heart by being untrue.

To Roy it’s about being jilted. To me, his 1964 operatic rock ballad is about the loss of summer. Alas, another summer is ending.

There’s still a month to go before summer officially gives way to autumn. Leaves on the trees are fading but seem in no hurry to turn to their golds, crimsons and yellows. Temperatures are above normal, even at night. The lake is still warm enough for swimming.

The calendar, however, cannot be denied. Some students are back in school already and the remainder return to classes in less than two weeks. Birds and insects are saying their goodbyes to August blooms. They know that global warming or not, temperatures will start to fall any day now …

Sorry, but summer is over.

I’m not unhappy about that. I’ve never been a summer fan. Maybe that’s because of a fair chunk of life spent in Northwestern Ontario and Northern Alberta, places where summers can be fair but often short.

That’s not to say I dislike summer or begrudge those who love it. Most people relish the sun and heat and the swimming, golfing and other outdoor pursuits.

Some are seriously affected when summer ends. They suffer Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which most often strikes people during the winter. When it occurs in summer it’s called Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Studies show that roughly 15 per cent of Canadians will experience some SAD depression in their lifetimes, most because of winter, but many because of summer’s end.

U.S.-based National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAM) regards the late summer blues as serious enough to declare September Suicide Prevention Month.

For me, there is something special about the end of summer. It is a time of beauty and plenty.

Late summer blooms, domestic and wild, put on a glorious show before wilting and waiting for the early frosts to end their year.

Fresh vegetables become abundant. Corn and tomatoes, available only in cans or shipped in from far-off places at other times of the year, are close at hand to be picked fresh.

Whether you are outside admiring the flowers, or picking corn, you can do so without the painful bother or mosquitoes and other bugs. They are not all gone yet, but they certainly are a lot less numerous than they were a month or so ago.

Summer’s end also is a time for reflection, and for planning. While thinking back on the joys of a terrific summer, it’s time to start planning for winter and it’s special joys. There is curling and hockey and skiing and skating to look forward to.

And, for many there is planning for that winter vacation that probably has been postponed for the last couple of years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There also are holidays and festivities to look forward to: Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, Hallowe’en, then Christmas and New Year’s.

Sunbathing days certainly are gone, or going, but the change from summer to fall does not mean an end to comfort and warmth.

I’m looking forward to wearing my bomber jacket and feeling a fluffy wool blanket on the bed. Then there’s the comfort foods. A bowl of hot soup or warm chili.

The change of season brings change to many parts of our lives, and that’s a good thing. What we eat and what we wear changes with the season and so does how we think.

Human beings need change. Change refreshes our attitudes and allows us to replace old, worn-out thinking.

We are lucky to live in a place where Nature provides change four times a year.

 My lawnmower has been put away for the winter. I doubt if I’ll bring it out next spring.

This year I didn’t cut the grass until well into June. It grew to a foot high with native grasses and weeds.

The idea was to allow the grass to get a firm, healthy footing before being mowed. The result was a surprise: everything in the lawn grew tall and healthy, and some tiny but beautiful flowers bloomed.

Among the blooms were five-petalled purple wild violets that had drifted in on the wind and taken hold in the lawn. Along with, of course, the white clover hated by many lawn enthusiasts.

These flowers attracted pollinators like bees, butterflies and hummingbirds.

What I saw in my uncut lawn helped me to understand the movement to make our landscapes more natural. It’s called rewilding and can take many forms, but, simply put, it is about making our environments, and our lifestyles, more natural.

Rewilding projects are as small as letting your lawn grow naturally, and as big as reintroducing large mammals to places where they once were numerous. For instance, Rewilding Europe is working to establish herds of bison in parts of Europe where they once existed.

Scientists say that large mammals such as bison, deer, moose and lions act as landscape engineers, shaping the composition of plant life and wildlife – from birds and aquatic creatures to trees and soil organisms. They are an important part of natural processes that alleviate damage created by unhealthy greenhouse gases causing global warming.

Meanwhile, I saw my uncut lawn as prettier and more useful to the environment than a mowed one.

There are an estimated one-quarter billion lawns in North America – 230 million in the United States, six million plus in Canada and some in Mexico, although Mexicans are not nearly as enamoured with them as we are.

That’s a lot of lawns, but there will be fewer in the future. More people are seeing lawns for what they really are – water hungry monocultures devoid of any plant diversity and insect life. They are outdated symbols of the past and a sign of our disconnection from nature.

Lawns began appearing in 17th century England when aristocrats were rich enough to manicure their land for display, instead of farming it for food.

By the 1950s, manicured lawns became symbols of the good life in North American suburbs. Along with green grass that did nothing except look pretty and drink water came lawnmowers, trimmers, blowers, chemical fertilizers and weed killers.

Letting your lawn return to a natural state is not easy, and likely won’t make you popular with your neighbours. However, it can be done on a small scale, one piece of lawn at a time turned into a patch of wildflowers.

It’s all about creating more diversity – helping populations of insects, animals, fish and birds recover. More natural populations of these creatures help to reduce the damage of atmospheric carbon.

Before there is any rewilding of a yard, field or anything else there has to be human rewilding. That involves undoing the unhealthy practices of today and going back to more natural ways of living.

Human rewilding doesn’t mean we need to revert to wearing animal skins and living in caves. It means thinking about how to live with less of what we want and don’t really need.

One thing we do really need is food, and food equality, yet despite all the advances in agriculture, growing enough nutritious food to feed a growing world population is becoming a worry.

Matthew Evans, author of Soil: The incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy, writes that between polluting/poisoning of the land and erosion, the world has lost an estimated one-third of its cropland in the last 40 years.

He notes research that says arable land per capita has been declining since 1984, and so have grain and fish production per capita.

We never will eliminate all the waste and pollution that we create. However, by changing our thinking about what we really need, we can work to ensure that pollution and waste don’t grow faster than nature can absorb, recycle or neutralize them

I was having one of those bad days that everyone has. Hot water tank gave out, thunder storm took out satellite service and a boat flying a flag with an obscenity for the prime minister raced along the shoreline for all the young swimmers to see.

(Covid seems to have robbed some people of any small bits of intelligence they might have possessed. Many of us dislike Trudeau but intelligent protests are done at the ballot box, not with obscene language in public).

At any rate, it had been a heavily depressing day so I took a walk to a favourite place in the woods. There’s a marsh there, almost 100 per cent covered with lily pads and their spectacular star-like blooms.

It was early evening and I noticed the pure white blooms with their yellow centres appeared shrunken; not widely open and smiling at the sky as they do on sunny mornings.

Then it struck me: here was another important lesson from Mother Nature, the greatest of all teachers.

Water lilies wake up in the morning, spreading their petals wide to take in whatever the day has to offer. It may be happy sunshine or rain and ripping winds, but they accept it all and go about their business of providing food to beaver and moose, shelter to fish and pollination for the ecosystem. And, of course, calming beauty to an increasingly frenetic world.

In late afternoon or early evening they fold their petals, closing the book on the day’s events. Then they rest, recharging their energy for when morning light opens their blooms for another day.

Like many things in nature, the water lily is smarter than we humans. It knows when to close down and recharge, and when to open a new chapter. Tomorrow is another day.

Too often, humans don’t know when to stop. We push ahead with tasks and disputes without taking time out to pause, reconsider and regroup.

Water lilies are magical. They grow out of the mud several feet below the water’s surface, producing waxy pads that float on the water’s surface. The flowers produce seeds that sink to the pond’s bottom and produce new growth.

There are several dozen species of water lilies growing around the world in different sizes and different colours. Ones found in the Amazon can have flowers 100 to 200 centimetres (three to six feet) in width and pads that can hold as much as 30 kilograms (66 pounds).

Water lilies have spiritual significance in some cultures. In Buddhism and Hinduism the lilies symbolize resurrection because the petals close at night and reopen in the morning, similar to spiritual rebirth.

Buddhists also believe that the water lily represents enlightenment because its beautiful blooms emerge from the darkness of a muddy pond bottom. There is an Egyptian creation story that says the Sun God, the earth’s creator, emerged from a primordial water lily and banished the darkness.

It is hard to think of another flower that has been more drawn, painted or photographed than the water lily. There are tens of thousands of water lily photos to be seen through books, magazines and online.

Claude Monet, the famous French impressionist, produced a series of 250 water lily oil paintings over a 12-year period. They depict the flower gardens at his home in Giverny, a village in northern France.

His water lily paintings are wildly popular and sell for millions whenever one is put to auction. One of the paintings auctioned in 2014 brought in $54 million U.S, dollars

Vincent Van Gough, another famous artist, is not known to have spent a lot of time painting water lilies. However, he produced a pen-pencil drawing of water lilies in a pond when he was young and deciding whether to become an artist

Water lilies do not seem to have caught the eye of writers as much as they have of painters. However, the Turkish writer Mehmet Murat Ildan has written a line that captures the essence of this wonderful plant:

“In a marshland amongst the crocodiles, there float beautiful water lilies! Even in the Hell, one can find the good and the beauty.”