Layla in February

Layla on the Ice—photo by William E Evans, © 2021

February is making up for the lack of anything beyond cold rain earlier this winter. And Layla is in her element, even on the ice, which seems we’re having more of than light, fluffy snow. Her four-paw drive makes her very competent. It’s quite clearly better than two, as the Management [1] demonstrates sliding sideways downhill on black ice. She slides a bit herself, though she can recover faster.

Patience isn’t a husky’s strongest attribute, but she understands the pace of our walks is a bit slower than before when picking our way around the mounds of frozen snow left by the plows. Besides, the hill in the corner of the yard is always available for sliding on her back, legs akimbo like a cheerleader with little modesty or compunction.

Layla has become more of a homebody the longer she’s lived with us. Though she still needs an escort when she steps out into the yard. Just beyond the door, there remain too many wildlife temptations for a husky. Try as she might to behave, she wasn’t born with Irish Catholic guilt. The only prick of conscience she might feel is letting the fox run away free.

She will hang out on the screen porch if someone stays in the room downstairs facing the lake–my office most days. Or the deck by the dining room if we’re fixing dinner. Or she’ll spend time on the upper deck when D is in her office–anything to enjoy the freezing weather.

So the brief video below is Layla doing her best clown act.

[1] With another nod to Peter Mayle’s It’s a Dog’s Life

Needing a cut-through, the neighborhood red fox uses the seawall–breakwater– groyne–whatever you call a one foot tall wooden wall that keeps the yard from washing into the lake. We had it extended alongside the creek a couple years ago to discourage the beaver from dragging his fat ass onto the lawn to eat any more of our red buds and oak saplings. Before starting the work, the County informed our contractor we needed a permit ‘cause it was a retaining wall. Well, yes, in theory it does go down into the creek two or so feet. And we would need tiebacks to keep it from falling over. The creek is all of two feet wide, with about six inches of water, so if it fell only the minnows would notice.

Here’s the rub: a one foot differential between the lake level and top of the wall isn’t sufficient lateral pressure to do more than cause the timbers to slide into the lake as the last seawall did after rotting over several decades. No one died in the failing seawall.

But you can’t fight city hall, and I wasn’t going to drive 16 miles out I-66–which is always under construction, has traffic backups, wrecks, or all three simultaneously–to the Herrity Building (named for a deceased local pol who never saw an office development he didn’t approve) to argue the point with the County permit gurus. So we paid the contractor the extra $$$ for the reinforcement.

Of course these are the same County whiz kids who allowed a neighbor across the way to keep his several eight foot retaining walls running across the full width of his property without guardrails. Oh, and without a building permit, RPA (resource protection area) or site plan approvals. After spending $10K for our ‘required’ site plan, and another $10K bond to VDOT to protect their crumbling asphalt, am I bitter? Oh no.

So when the racoons aren’t using the top of the seawall for their personal highway, the fox is, and he’s in fine fettle in his red winter parka. Maybe my next video will be his runway strut across the seawall.

One of our neighbors posted photos of an eagle chowing down on what she identified as a cormorant. We now have cormorants wintering over. I suspect the bird was dead, since eagles don’t pass up easy meals, but he was on the ice with his catch. The cormorants like perching on the taller points of the dam, or on trees leaning out over the water, and perhaps the eagle was tempted by the sight. Someone commenting on the photos asked where was Marlin Perkins, which is sufficient evidence that we have a bunch of old fogies in our community.

Though it’s beyond question we now have a resident group of eagles. Living in a forest with a lake as its centerpiece helps. Our first house in Lake Barcroft was within sight of the lake, though not on it, and we were happy to live under the canopy of oaks and tulip poplars. Lakefront properties were out of our reach, but it didn’t bother us–knowing we could tote the green canoe down the hill and drop it in on a nice spring day was cheer enough. Without the forest, Lake Barcroft would be greatly lacking–as well as lacking eagles.

Trees and Civilization

Our neighbors a few miles up Columbia Pike in Arlington are fighting to preserve their trees. Neighbors mount effort to defend Arlington’s trees from development In the WP article, the impact of so many McMansions being built on one-eighth acre lots is becoming obvious.

“Arlington has been a center of the McMansion boom—new homeowners tearing down small postwar structures to build bigger ones that approach their property lines. The county’s population has grown from 190,000 to an estimated 237,000 in the past 20 years, according to census data, with more dense housing along the Orange and Silver lines corridor and thousands of jobs planned as part of Amazon’s HQ2 project.”

From WP article, Neighbors mount effort to defend Arlington’s trees from development by Justin Wm. Moyer

Arlington’s pols don’t seem to be inspired to protect their trees. Which is odd. Arlington appears to be going through a political transformation from deep blue, save the whales and hug the trees to let’s keep our taxes low, and reign in government.

The County’s high water mark was reached when Jay Fissette led the County Board and they were funding the design and construction of a proposed Columbia Pike streetcar system, since abandoned. At one time, Arlington led Northern Virginia in a vision of well planned development built on the Metro transit system. Somewhere along the way, the County seems to have lost its way.

The Arlington streetcar argument went as follows: Buses and streetcars are much the same mode of transportation, and buses are cheaper. Oh really? The cleanest fuel that buses today can run on is natural gas, unless you string overhead electrical catenaries as they do in Seattle. Buses can freely mingle with the car traffic with no road improvements required–improvements such as widening sidewalks, creating safety islands, landscaping–otherwise known as streetscape improvements. Streetcar systems therefore require a greater investment in infrastructure, QED, streetcars are bad.

Lord knows we shouldn’t ever spend our tax money on infrastructure improvements.

In New Orleans, one of the best ways to see the city on the cheap is to catch a ride on their antique streetcars. Catch the Canal Street line to Bourbon Street, then transfer to the St. Charles line heading out past the Garden District, Tulane, Loyola, past the bend at the Mississippi River to the turnaround. Half the fun is watching the characters–your fellow passengers.

photo by Robert Kaufmann–from the FEMA Photo Library

Note the pedestrian close by the streetcar walking comfortably in the opposite direction–if you avoid the tracks you avoid the streetcar–how easy is that?

Now I won’t argue that Columbia Pike might ever match the charm of the St. Charles line–not in my lifetime. But it won’t improve at all at the rate Arlington is going–and the low income immigrants living in Culmore just beyond the proposed terminus at Bailey’s Crossroads won’t be seeing an easy way to work in Arlington and Alexandria. The expression about noses and the faces they are affixed to comes to mind. I suppose they’ll take the bus.

On a brief stay in Zurich a few years ago, we quickly learned the streetcars got us where we wanted to go just as easily as the cabs, and again we were people watching the entire way. We stepped on and off the streetcar as we wanted to, we crossed the tracks freely like the locals, and generally navigated across a greater part of the city. When wanting to visit Lucerne, we caught a streetcar to the rail station, and had a smooth ride there and back.

The immediate municipality of Zurich has a population of 434,335 and the entire metro region has 1.83 million. By comparison, Arlington has 236,842 and sits cheek to jowl by Alexandria (157,613) and Fairfax (1.146 million)  I’ll admit Zurich has a few years on Northern Virginia–a couple thousand to be truthful–but a civilization is measured by the environments in which its people dwell. And Northern Virginia has a ways to go.

Layla in Redux

Layla loves her yard loaded with trees, from the red oaks, to the maple and hickory. Especially when there’s snow on the ground. And after a vigorous walk (preferably two or three per day), she likes to cool down on a nice bed of ice. Good for the bones, she says. Did you know a determined husky can pull three to four times her own weight when pursuing a red fox? And don’t get me started on cats.

“Why does love got to be so sad?”—photo by William E Evans, © 2021

… and if it would only snow again—photo by William E Evans, © 2021

Is dinner ready?

photo by William E Evans, © 2021