This Side Up

When there’s a dolphin on the porch

John Howell
Posted 6/16/15

Ollie.

Okay, for those who read this column, you’re anticipating another story about the spotted coon hound we adopted more than two years ago from the East Greenwich Animal Protection League. …

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This Side Up

When there’s a dolphin on the porch

Posted

Ollie.

Okay, for those who read this column, you’re anticipating another story about the spotted coon hound we adopted more than two years ago from the East Greenwich Animal Protection League. And you’d be right, but this column is really about change and how we react to it.

Sunday started off peacefully. Our companion is a slow riser, which is welcome at this time of year when the sky starts brightening at 4:30.

About 5:45 Ollie climbed off the couch that has now become “his,” stretched, wagged a good morning and promptly lay down, his muzzle between his out forelegs watching to see what we’d do.

Carol was up. She’d already been down to the kitchen and had a mug of tea. Ollie caught on. He’d already missed something. You could imagine the wheels turning. Maybe my breakfast is waiting. Maybe there’s a dish with the coating of a soft-boiled egg. He was up in a flash, racing downstairs.

In a moment we heard his growl, followed by a prolonged howl, the kind of alarm he sounds when he spots an unfamiliar dog walking past the drive or a jet ski on the bay. He has a thing for jet skies.

We went down to see what this was all about. He was staring out the porch door, fixated, the hackles on his back raised. We had an intruder, or so I thought.

I expected to see a raccoon or at least a strange dog in the yard. Nothing.

Then I realized what triggered his outburst. It was the pool dolphin I had inflated for my twin granddaughters. Its bottlenose was pointed directly at Ollie, and its friendly eyes cast in his direction.

We both laughed, and Ollie actually seemed somewhat embarrassed by our reaction.

Dolphins on porches are not such a weird phenomenon when inflatable and made in China.

But there are some changes.

Usually by the end of May, after a week of 75 to 80 degree weather, I head down to the basement, slide the panel off the gas boiler and shut off the pilot light. After all, I figure, what’s the point of keeping the water in the boiler warm, or for that matter the pilot burning for the summer.

Invariably, there’s a day or two when the evening temperatures dip in the 50s and Carol considers my thrifty ways an extreme. But if there’s cold weather, it never lasts too long.

This year is different.

I didn’t consider shutting off the pilot until this weekend, and even then I’m thinking it might be premature. The irony is that Carol has brought down the fans from the attic, and at her urging I got one of the air conditioners set up. We’re prepared either way.

And then, of course, there was this winter. When was the last time the Northeast got so much snow? And it seemed winter just wouldn’t quit. We heard those who blamed it and the instances of extreme weather conditions, like all that rain in drought-dried Texas, on global warming and climate change. The explanation that the jet stream is dipping to the south certainly seemed to explain why sometimes this winter it was warmer in Alaska than Rhode Island. And then, likewise, rising sea levels make sense with the loss of heat-reflecting snow and ice, water temperatures and the cycle of ice cap melting accelerates.

There are those who say it is a product of what humanity has done to Mother Earth, and as loudly, although not so much in these parts, there are those who put their faith in the divine, not the scientists.

On Friday, I attended the last in a weeklong lecture series hosted by the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting at the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. The speaker, a former Metcalf Institute fellow, was Julia Kumari Drapkin. She is a petite woman and former public radio reporter with a big passion for bringing people information in a non-judgmental presentation. Her plan was for people to ask about changes they had noticed and for her to find scientists who could offer explanations.

Drapkin realized there are many stories about environmental change beside the extraordinary weather events that make the headlines. These are personal observations, which may not seem significant when isolated from everything else happening in the world. The Association of Independents in Radio was interested, and Drapkin ended up in Paonia, Colo., where farming and coal mining are staples of life. From video she showed, distrust of Eastern liberals and Al Gore’s documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is also part of Paonia. She discovered some inhabitants had kept records for generations that guided them, such as knowing the time to plant potatoes is when the lilacs first bloom. Then she found some out-of-the-ordinary things happening. The fire season, when lightning strikes are as much harbingers of rain as they are brush fires, was earlier than ever in memory. As startling to the local fire chief was that in the midst of one of these fires, they were hit with a snowstorm.

There were other freak reports of a dust storm coating freshly fallen snow and dandelions blossoming weeks earlier than seen before. Drapkin created an online almanac, “I See Change,” enabling people to post these observations and for those with answers to respond. She purposely didn’t reach any conclusions on who is responsible for global warming.

Funding ran dry for her public radio programming, but what she had done and her commitment to get journalists to report stories of change has been noticed, and she gained funding from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. The scale of her project has mushroomed Paonia to the world. The “I See Change” almanac is open to postings from across the globe, offering crowd-sourced environmental reporting. From what I saw on the site Sunday, it offered a mix of weather reports and observations, such as that of a biker in New Zealand who came upon a landfill in a sectioned-off part of a reserve on the south island.

We have our own share of “I See Change” occurrences. Consider we have snowy white owls, belugas in the bay and a nine-spot ladybug at Rocky Point that hasn’t been seen in 30 years. So far, there are no reports of live dolphins on a porch, but maybe it’s time we start howling.

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