Interview with Anne
Transcription of interview
Anne:
“When I came here, thirteen, hunting was the thing to do.
And fishing was the thing to do. There
weren’t very many people in Vermont then, and the effect of it was minimal.
But now there are a lot of people in Vermont, at least who come here.
And you have to include them, if they’re here temporarily, they’re
here still, you know, and they’re here with fishing rods, and rifles.
And they make a major impact upon life.
At some point along the line, I realized that not only were the people
here, but they’re all over the globe. And
I began to consider in my mind what six billion really means.
Billion, with a B. I write a
journal every day, and when I first started it, I had so much stuff accumulated
from all my life that I wanted to get down that I was writing about two thousand
words or more every day. I did that
for two and a half years, and I finally got one million words written. And if I had done that, now, multiply that by a thousand, and
you will get a billion. At least in
a sense, I have some concept now of just how monstrously big a billion is, and
there are over six billion people on this planet now. And a very few of us are hogging all of the resources.
And a lot of the other folks are beginning to get into the idea that they
want to live the way we do. And
they’re building roads, and they’re building cars, and they’re going to
take up all our fuel at an ever increasing rate, and something awful is going to
happen if we don’t start watching carefully what we’re doing.
What I have is a tiny little check, this little postage stamp of a nature
area, with the idea that HERE, the human species is at least on an equal footing
with all the others, we are not in charge of them.
They have an equal right to live here, as I do.
I am an inhabitant just as much as that big snapping turtle I saw the
other day. Oh, it was a gorgeous
thing. He was about¼
looking in the water magnifies things, but this is what I saw. Tip to tip.
Kate: “That’s
in your pond?”
Anne: “Yeah.
He swam right by my canoe, about this far away from the gunnel, I looked,
I took, right down on top of him, the brilliant sun so I could see him in every
detail, and it was breath taking. Here’s
this huge animal, in its home and looking beautiful, no harm to me, no harm to
him. It just made my heart beat fast.”
Kate: “Sounds
beautiful.”
Anne: “They are.
And you see them on the road, and they’re in an area where they’re not,
that’s not their native habitat, they’re looking for a place to lay eggs,
and people come along and torment them, and they can’t see well because these
eyes are designed to see underwater-
we can’t see well either unless we put goggles on-
and so they get ugly. But they’re not natively, naturally, ugly.
They’re very peaceful and placid.
You can step on one with impunity. I
mean, he might be outraged, but he won’t bite you, because he’s not keyed up
with this inability to see. I mean
when you’re walking in the water, and you step on one.
I’ve never heard of anyone being bitten that way.”
“I’ve got a record of
the birds that have been observed here, because my mom was dedicated bird
watcher, and a good one. And so my
eyes got used, I was to. We have a
pretty good record. Some of them,
you see, are transient. Things like
the golden eagle. You’re not
going to see them everyday. You’re
not going to see them every year, for that matter.
We saw one a year ago; I saw it, Kate McQueery saw it, Len Diggybell saw
it, and we had to call the, we had to go look it up before we were able to
believe that we had actually seen it. I
had seen one back in, I think¼
I don’t know when it was¼
early fifties, as a [what?], but it wasn’t actually on our property, but it
was visible from it. But they’re
here, and someone has seen a group of them up on the Battenkill this year.
So they’re around, but they don’t stay, I don’t think.
They may. You can’t tell. They
don’t read the books, you see. They
find a nice place; they say ‘This is a nice place, let’s live here.’
We had, for two or three years, we had nesting pairs of solitary
sandpipers. They don’t breed
here, right? They say in the book,
they live north of the Arctic Tundra. But
they were here. There’s no
denying it.”
“I try to respect all
creatures here. I try to keep them
on an equal footing with us. No
scientists are allowed here except me. I
can show you good reasons why, because for example if the scientists were here
looking physically at the frogs in the pond, they would do the thing with the
net. And they would get the frogs,
and they want to identify them next year, and see how they’ve grown; it’s
what scientists want to do, there’s nothing wrong with wanting that knowledge.
But how do you know, how can you tell a frog a second time?”
Kate: “Do they
tag them?”
Anne: “That
won’t work. And neither will the
radio thing work; they’re too small. So
what they do is they clip toes off of them.
That’s one reason they’re not allowed here.
It’s something not generally known.
And to see the justification that the scientists use for clipping toes,
it’s basically ‘’Cause we want to know, and it’s the only way we know
how to identify them.” I mean
their point is, “We need to make a living, and this is how we do it.’
That’s like a hired killer saying as he’s shooting you, ‘This is
how I make my living.’ Try
something else. Try to do your job
in a different way.”
Kate: “When did
you lean of the airport’s plan?”
Anne: “It’s
been whispered around for quite a while. I
was told that they have settled on not expanding the runway, but realigning the
runway. Which implies that¼
it was built, that runway, initially, was built way back a long time ago, early
fifties maybe, or perhaps even in the late forties, I can’t remember, I’ve
no idea. So they’re now saying
that that engineering was wrong. It was then extended a good while after that, and they’re
saying now that that engineering also was wrong.
But why did they extend it then when they should have realigned it?
The answer is: I think they really want to extend it, realign it, so that
it aims directly at the Singing Pond so as they have a proper excuse for taking
it, which they don’t have at the moment.
It’s a wetland, it’s been classified, it’s been reclassified just
recently, as you perhaps know. Rosalie’s mom owns wetland now, which she did not own
before. I mean the wetland, of
course, was there all the time, you know, but they’ve been officially
recognized by the state of Vermont as being class two-
significant-
wetlands. Class one would include
perhaps an endangered species, however, I don’t know where any are.
Class two means they’re right up on the top.
So there’s all sorts of headaches involved in taking a wetland. And the more, the better.
I don’t have any objection to airplanes, I don’t have any objection
to having an airport, but we don’t need one this size, and it certainly
doesn’t need to be made longer, and if it was adequate now, and if it was
adequate for decades and decades and decades, which it has been, there’s no
need to realign it. It’s just
spending taxpayers’ money for the benefit of a very, very few people.
And for that reason, I’m objecting to it.
“I don’t think they
have a problem, I’ve never seen any of the larger airplanes have problems.
They have lots of power, and are usually well up in the air by the time
they get to the end of the runway. I
spent four years in the air force you know, and I’ve seen some birds that
needed the big long runway. Bombers
heavily loaded. But we don’t have
much need for them.”
“And then, along with
each species, this is the pickerel frog species, then I have a sequence of
photographs. This is not meant to
be a field guide, where they will give you one picture, but a sequence of
pictures, showing, in this case, a mature pickerel frog with camouflage that he
has put on. See the little twig
across his back, there’re also, on his head, three spruce needles.
Do you see them? And with his natural coloration, if I had not known
where that animal was, I never would have been able to see him to take the
pictures. I saw him jump, I dropped
my gloves right where I had been standing, and I went and got the camera, and I
came back and there he was still,
with the camouflage by then. He was
somewhere in this area here, and I could here his call.
See if I can do it¼
[calls]. Nah, I can’t do it very
well ‘cause I haven’t been practicing with a tape recorder, it’s just for
my own memory. But when you hear
it, it’s very distinctive.”
“Now, these little guys
are so active that they can jump three feet easily. And they go like shooting a rubber band.
Did you ever do that in school?”
Rosie: “Yeah¼”
Anne: “So did I!
And he’d go like a rubber band he shot. Whing! They’re gone, you
know. They’re very small, and
very agile. This shows one in the
brush. You see it?”
Rosie: “Ummm.
Just a minute.”