Sunrise: Hayfield

Sunrise, Hayfield

Not much to this post but the picture, of a beautiful fall morning in southern Ohio. If the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet had painted this scene, he might have titled it, “Sunrise, Hayfield.”

A Sad End for a Deer

When I first moved to Ohio a few months ago, I thought there was something quaint about the state law that says if you hit and kill a deer on a roadway, you can keep the carcass, as long as you report it. But there was nothing quaint about the scene I witnessed today on the freeway: A dead deer — a large young buck, by the look of him — sprawled across two lanes, legs buckled beneath him. A couple hundred yards up the road, a car was pulled over, front end smashed, and a woman was crying hysterically — at her own bad luck, I’m sure, but perhaps also over taking the life of a beautiful creature suddenly, inadvertently and needlessly.

Much of Ohio is covered with forest, and there are a lot of deer in those forests, and it would be all too easy to run into one darting across the road some evening — any road. Even at 40 mph, you’d have little chance of stopping in time. Makes you nervous.

Clifton Gorge

The rock wall at Clifton Gorge

Clifton Gorge cuts a deep, rocky gash through central Ohio about an hour north of Cincinnati. Mrs. SR013 and I drove up for a hike there on a warm fall day. As you walk into the gorge from the west, it gradually gets deeper and narrower, until finally you break through the heavy forest and see rushing water (the Little Miami River) and sheer rock walls. It’s unusual terrain for this part of Ohio, which tends to be rolling hills as far as the eye can see. Our four-mile round-trip hike on a well-maintained trail was refreshing. We ran into a lot of Ohioans along the way who, like us, were enjoying a mild September afternoon.

American Geese Idyll

Six of the Nine

All of a sudden there are a lot more geese around. We can hear them honking in the early morning and at other times as they fly around the ‘hood.

A bunch of them suddenly appeared in the pond across the street, which seems to have pushed the original nine that have been hanging around all summer into our yard for more and more of the day. They come up the driveway and eat apples, crabapples and god knows what else, and leave a lot of poop behind. They’re not very afraid of me when I walk down the driveway, as you can see from this picture.

It’ll be interesting to see when they take off for the winter, and when — and if — they return.

New Report on the Ru-Burbs

One measure of the spread of ru-burbia came in a recent report on three counties in northern Kentucky that are part of the greater Cincinnati area. It showed that the amount of cropland across the three counties decreased by an average of more than 22 percent between 2002 and ’07. Rapid population growth is the main culprit, and is expected to continue.

Maybe there’s hope. One executive in Boone County said that that region can accommodate tens of thousands of new residents within existing developed areas. The county can discourage development that sprawls unnecessarily, he said, as quoted in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Then again, the city of Alexandria in northern Kentucky touts itself as “Where the City Meets the Country.” “We have every amenity available to us, but we can escape to the peace and quiet of our community just by coming home,” says a statement on the city’s website, an attitude that pretty much ensures more and more small farms will become islands in ru-burbia.