Rebecca Writes

 
Until I came north, everything I knew about ravens, I learned in Sunday school. (Okay, in Sunday school and from Edgar Allan Poe.) We had their close cousins, the crows, where I grew up in Minnesota, but I don’t remember ever seeing a raven. According to this map, there should have been some there, but I guess I missed them. 

It’d be impossible for a child to grow up in the Yukon and not notice the ravens. They are here and they are not silent.

Northerners tend to have a love-hate relationship with these big black birds. If we don’t lock the lids tight on our garbage cans, the packaging from our food waste will be spread all over the neighbourhood by trash-picking ravens. Can you see that the one in the photo (above left) is carrying a scavenged treasure? Once I saw a raven fly off with a whole package of cheddar cheese from a bag of groceries left in the back of a pickup truck in the supermarket parking lot. I’d like to have heard the conversation in that kitchen when it came time to make the grilled cheese sandwiches for supper.

 
It’s because ravens seem to relish life that we love them. When it comes to ravens, bird-brained isn’t stupid, and some of that raven brain power is used purely for amusement. Ravens love to swirl and roll in the air currents near the edge of the escarpment rimming town, performing stunt-pilot-worthy aerobatics displays. I have it on good authority that ravens have been seen sliding down snowbanks just for the fun of it. Another favorite pastime is playing “Nonny-nonny-nonny, you can’t catch me!” with my dog. Frankly, in an I.Q. competition between my dog and a raven, I’m not sure my dog would come out on top.

Their extreme cleverness shows itself in their hoarding behaviour. Sometimes ravens will store bits of stolen food in little caches so they can come back for it later, and studies have shown that they find their stockpiles again because they remember where they put them. They also spy on other ravens to see where they are burying their goodies, so that when the opportunity arises, the neighbour’s stash can be raided. Sometimes a hoarding raven will only pretend to bury food in order to throw the thieving spies and raiders off the trail. You might say that ravens are the greedy geniuses of the bird world.

But let’s get back to what I learned about ravens in Sunday school, way before any real-life raven encounters.  I learned, first of all, that it is God who feeds them.

Who provides for the raven its prey,
when its young ones cry to God for help,
and wander about for lack of food? (Job 38:41)

That’s a rhetorical question and we’re supposed to answer, “God does.” If you need further confirmation, see Psalm 147:9 and Luke 12:24.

God intentionally provides prey and other goodies for the ravens. Yes, they dumpster dive and trash pick and forage for berries and scavenge for carrion and hunt small rodents. They even eat carcass-feeding maggots and beetles. (How’s that for opportunistic snacking?) And this is how God  feeds them.

According to Wikipedia, the raven’s “diet may vary widely with location, season and serendipity,” which my dictionary defines as “the occurrence or development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” It’s not quite serendipity, of course, if God feeds them, is it? But if we changed “by chance” to “by God’s intent” in that definition, we’d have a fairly good definition of providence. God intentionally controls the occurrence and development of events with a happy and beneficial result for the ravens.

So by providence, it is, that the ravens are fed. I leave the lid on my garbage can unfastened and it is God’s provision for them. The unguarded bag of groceries in the back of the pick up? Providence for the birds. Road kill? God’s good gift to the hungry young ones. Ravens have enough brain power to devise clever schemes for keeping their food finds all to themselves. This, as well, is God’s providence for them. All these things are good gifts from God who feeds the ravens.

Now Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” 2 And the word of the Lord came to him: 3 “Depart from here and turn eastward and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. 4 You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.” 5 So he went and did according to the word of the Lord. He went and lived by the brook Cherith that is east of the Jordan. 6 And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook. (1 Kings 17:1-6) 

Photo by Andrew Stark 

King’s Throne in Kluane National Park, with the Kathleen River Bridge in the foreground, in early spring two years ago.  This is my current desk top photo.

Bill Pinkham, Veteran
Glenwood Springs, Colorado
Photo: Carol Falcetta

One of the reasons I chose a dog theme for this month is that February is when the toughest dog sled race in the world, the Yukon Quest, takes place. This year, the Yukon Quest runs from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, a thousand miles along “historic Gold Rush and Mail Delivery dog sled routes from the turn of the 20th Century” at a time when

The race began this past Saturday with twenty-four dog teams. Already two of the twenty-four teams are out of the race. One was withdrawn by officials “for failing to provide the dog care expected of a Yukon Quest participant”; and the other, Whitehorse’s own Frank Turner, a race veteran who has run 24 out of the 25 Yukon Quest races, dropped out because of the race’s physical demands on his aging body. Turner, who is 60, said,

For more information on The Yukon Quest, visit the Yukon Quest website.

When I was a child I read a novel that mentioned a year in the 1800s when there was no summer. I read a book a day at that time and they all blend together, so you can’t expect me to remember a title. What I’ve never forgotten, however, is that there really was a year without a summer.

I imagined a year with snow cover all year round, when people ice skated on frozen lakes in July. That wasn’t exactly the way it was, but 1816 was an unusual weather year. There was a snowstorm that dumped 4 inches of snow in New England in the middle of June, and there was frost overnight for several days in a row in both July and August. In between those extraordinary occurrences, there was fairly normal summer weather, but the frosts caused crop failure in the northeastern US and eastern Canada.

In Europe, there was almost constant cold, wet gloom, and crop failures, too. In Ireland, it rained for 142 of the summer days, causing a famine. There was no grape harvest in France and no grain harvest in Germany. 

Historians blame the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia the year before. It was the biggest eruption in recorded history, and all those ash particles in the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere were bound to cause big changes in the weather.

Not everything was bad. There were brilliantly colourful sunrises and sunsets, which some say inspired the intense glowing depictions of the sun on the horizon in the paintings of the British impressionist painter J.M.W. Turner. You see an example in Turner’s painting of Flint Castle above, and another in one of his nautical paintings, The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up.

According to oral tradition, here in the Yukon there was a year in the 1800s with no summer, when people starved, too. In the 1970s, it was described by Yukon elder Rachel Dawson as occurring over one hundred years previous to her time.

Two winters joined together. No snow, but there was ice all over, and the winters were joined together. 

There are variations to the story, and it’s impossible to pin down exactly when it was. Perhaps it was 1816, when the Tambora volcano wreaked widespread havoc, or maybe it was either 1845, 1849, or 1850, when tree ring measurement shows very little growth.

But it all goes to show that in the weather realm, strange things can happen anywhere and anytime.

What I’m waiting for is the year with no winter. Of course, if that happened, they’d probably chalk it up, rightly or wrongly, to global warming, wouldn’t they?

Cranberries
Last evening the dog and I went on a cranberry scouting expedition. What did we find? The berries aren’t quite ripe yet, but there is a bumper crop this year—big berries and plentiful—like I haven’t seen since 1987.

And yes, I remember the exact year, because several years later I still had bags of cranberries in the freezer labeled, “Cranberries, September 1987.” Oldest daughter and her friend were ten years old, and for a couple of weeks in early September they’d disappear into the bush together whenever it could be arranged, and waddle home a couple of hours later, side by side, carrying a 5-gallon bucket of berries between them. (That was back in the days when reasonable parents still let their kiddies wander the bush unsupervised all afternoon as long as they were home for supper.)

Watermelon
All the watermelon I bought this year was disappointingly bland and flavourless and not very juicy. Even the big watermelon fans in the fam didn’t like it much, and I ended up throwing some away.  Do they even grow the slurpy, full-of-flavour, seeded melons like I grew up with anymore?

Peaches
I have been shamelessly admiring all the jars of canned peaches (and strawberry-rhubarb jam, too) lined up on a little table in the kitchen. What’s the point of slaving over the canner if you can’t admire your handiwork for a while before you store it away on a cool dark shelf in the basement?

I still plan to do a post on canning peaches, but it is taking longer than I expected to get it together. In case you are waiting for my instructions before canning peaches and your peaches are in danger of spoiling while you wait, let me recommend the book Putting Food By by Janet Greene. It is the very best resource there is on canning, preserving, freezing, drying, curing, smoking or cold storing food of all kinds—fruit, vegetable, or meat. If this book doesn’t have instructions for it, you don’t want to do it.

 Copyright © 2007, Andrew Stark. All rights reserved.