{"id":12846,"date":"2020-01-29T03:13:46","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T03:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=12846"},"modified":"2020-01-29T03:13:46","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T03:13:46","slug":"whats-missing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2020\/01\/29\/whats-missing\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Missing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
A red fox on the porch of a house. Photo credit: Rob Lee, CC license, accessed via Wikipedia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This year, my son joined the bantams. In hockey, this means he has officially entered the world of full-contact checking, and all that that entails for a 13-year-old boy. Mostly, this is talking about \u201cblowing kids up,\u201d \u201claying hippies\u201d on everyone he can, and otherwise looking to \u201cwreck people.\u201d The reality is a lot more tentative, and involves constantly looking over his shoulder as he glides to a near standstill in the corner. In my attempts to get him not to focus on hitting, I show him clips of NHL games and ask, \u201cWhat don\u2019t you see?\u201d What you don\u2019t see is players slowing down, giving up their positional advantage on the puck, and overly concerned about getting hit.<\/p>\n

Why this is the jumping-off point for this piece is to illustrate just how difficult it is to see something that is not there and how hard it is to learn from these examples. A case in point came up when I asked Simon, \u201cAre there foxes in Indian Creek?\u201d His answer was telling, \u201cMaybe once in a while, but I would say no.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ten years ago, when Simon was a toddler, there were at least three obvious fox dens on our drive out Indian Creek, and about the only reason you did not see a fox was because you forgot to look. There was a beautiful russet female coiled onto the lip of her burrow, there were kits born in the culvert at the turn past Mizer Gulch, and there was a black-coated fox that prowled the hills of our small canyon.<\/p>\n

I have seen fewer than five foxes in five years (and this is positive exaggeration\u2014I can actually remember none) and, at least in Simon\u2019s memory, foxes don\u2019t live in Indian Creek.<\/p>\n

I could almost say the same thing about rabbits. Three or four years ago, our record number driving to town was somewhere in the forties. That was in that particularly \u201crabbity\u201d year people may remember.<\/p>\n

Now, I know of one, mostly by its tracks, although I have caught a glimpse of it twice.<\/p>\n

Biologists talk about shifting baselines\u2014the gradual resetting of expectations based on what we experience. My oldest daughter, Georgia, grew up in a world of foxes and rabbits. They played into our daily stories, and showed up everywhere, from the surrounding hills, to the driveway, to the baby rabbit in the pantry. I am not sure Simon has seen a fox in Indian Creek, and rabbits are hardly part of his lore.<\/p>\n

What does this mean and what impact will this have? Beyond the types of stories I tell my kids, the simplest answer is, \u201cWho knows?\u201d And this always kind of freaks me out. At the end of the day, we don\u2019t know why the foxes are gone, why the rabbit populations have waned, or what either of these will mean in the short- or long-term narrative of our area.<\/p>\n

What I do know is that over a really short amount of time, \u201cno foxes\u201d became normal.<\/p>\n

The natural world is nothing if not an ebb and flow of things\u2014cycles, swirls and eddies of creatures great and small. I am increasingly fond of the annual hellos and goodbyes that mark the seasons, and there is something obvious and tangible about who is \u2018there.\u2019<\/p>\n

Lately, I\u2019ve been paying attention to what\u2019s not there, which is why I turned to the fox. Now I\u2019m wondering, \u201cWhat else am I missing?\u201d I cannot fully answer this, which somehow makes the answer seem more important to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES This year, my son joined the bantams. In hockey, this means he has officially entered the world of full-contact checking, and all that that entails for a 13-year-old boy. Mostly, this is talking about \u201cblowing kids up,\u201d \u201claying hippies\u201d on everyone he can, and otherwise looking to \u201cwreck people.\u201d The reality is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12847,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,34],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12846","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-commentary","8":"category-science-place"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}