The Mute and the Bald

Returning to Lake Parvin

When winter gets oppressive, and the clouds blanket us with gloom, I go looking for water. Under a steel gray sky, water is still beautiful. I took a forty-five minute drive, and luckily, Parvin Lake was not completely frozen over, though ice can have its own beauty.

Hooded Mergansers and a Mute Swan

A gem of the southern New Jersey park system, Parvin State Park was built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, who were employed aspart of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression. As the current administration fires all probationary workers in the National Park Service, I wanted to cite the origin of this park, so that it isn’t taken for granted. It was built by American workers and paid for by American citizens, like many other agencies and governmental infrastructure that they plan to dismantle to pay for a $4 trillion tax cut for the obscenely wealthy.

The rich mocked this as “paying people to dig holes and fill them back up,” as they do with every government program that puts people to work to create things of value to others. We’re still enjoying this “government waste” ninety years later.

It was oddly appropriate that I saw two Bald Eagles on my latest visit. One adult, one juvenile. I couldn’t get close, so these are tightly cropped photos taken at full zoom.

Eagles

This was my first time seeing eagles here. The pair of Mute Swans stays year-round. The last time I saw them, a third wheel kept attacking the male. A birder I met on the trail said that particular swan was also known for attacking people and cars, and the rangers were trying to capture it for its own safety. It was nowhere to be seen, so perhaps they succeeded.

Swans and Ice

I saw my first Black and White Warbler here, pointed out by the same birder. I learned to identify them by how they hop at the end of high tree branches. Cedar Waxwings like to feed along the hardwood swamp trail, and they are always pleasant to see. This time, I saw mostly waterfowl and the two eagles. A woodpecker scolded me from a high branch, but I was unable to spot them (this was before I got the new field glasses.) There were Buffleheads, both Hooded and Common Mergansers, the swans, plenty of Canada Geese, and also many Herring Gulls on the water. They were all quite shy, and my attempts to walk around the lake to get closer to the swans were foiled. By the time I got there, they moved to another little cove.

Common Mergansers Flapping

I met joggers and dog walkers and couples walking the path. It was quite lovely for a gloomy and cold Saturday. Parks, whether state, municipal, or national, are a natural tonic for our bodies and minds. We fail to protect that at our peril. The new leader of the Bureau of Land Management is looking at public land like he’s the landlord, reviewing National Monuments for mineral extraction.

Hooded Mergansers

If you’ve never seen an open pit mine, consider yourself lucky. I visited the hellscape in the Minnesota Iron Range that Robert Allen Zimmerman fled to become Bob Dylan, and it looks like an evil AI’s vision of the Grand Canyon. The Hull Rust Mine in Hibbing, Minnesota:

Surrounding this abcess on the Earth are abandoned and overgrown streets with the street signs still standing, as human habitation gave way for further profit. I pored through twenty years of digital photos looking for any I’d taken from this visit. It’s on the way to the International Wolf Center in Ely¹, Minnesota, which is a great place to visit; if you leave from Minneapolis, you’ll pass through Duluth, where the ore boats that export the taconite iron pellets by the thousand-ton, to be smelted into steel. The Edmund Fitzgerald was one of those ships, lost in a storm on Lake Superior. She may never give up her dead, but the lake gives up beautiful agates, of which I have one, which I polished myself. It’s only eye-size, but I keep in on my desk.

North of Ely is the Boundary Waters, along the border with Canada, and to the west is Voyageurs National Park, which is being eyed for its mineral wealth.² The news today read that one thousand people were fired from the National Park Service, so I hope you weren’t planning on visiting any of them this year. I wanted to visit Yosemite, but locals are already in a panic because of the effects of these illegal actions.

Well, there’s always State Parks.

1. Name-dropped by Dylan in “Wicked Messenger.”

2. Probably because the governor of that state run against the Dicktator.