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There aren’t supposed to be mountain lions around these parts. Sure, for decades, there have been sporadic sightings. Sometimes they turn out to be bobcats or fishers, other times, hoaxes. Most reports simply go unsubstantiated. After all, the cats are long gone. Extirpated. Wiped out. This spring, after decades in limbo, the eastern cougar was finally declared extinct.
Months later, a wild mountain lion that had roamed halfway across the country was killed by a car on the Merritt Parkway. Was he an anomaly? Or are there others out there?
Authorities insist that if more mountain lions were here, we’d know. “Even small populations of cougars leave physical evidence behind,” said Megan Racey, spokesman for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. “Scat, tracks, hair, genetic samples. They get hit by cars, shot by hunters, caught by traps.”
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Larry Hajna doesn’t know whether mountain lions still have protected status in the state, now that they’e been declared locally extinct. “Would you protect a rhinocerous?” he asked rhetorically.
But if they’re not here, then what are these giant, muscular tan cats with long tails that people keep seeing?
1500s: Mountain lions, also called cougars, are the most widely distributed mammal in the western hemisphere. Perceiving cougars as a danger to livestock, settlers set bounties, hunt and trap cougars.
1800s: Trapper Thomas Meacham kills 77 cougars in the Adirondack Mountains.
1929: “In the eastern States, [the puma] is virtually extinct. If there is a pair of cougars in the Green Mountains of Vermont, now, it is the highest possible number. If there are six pairs in the mountains between the Catskills and Georgia, I should be agreeably surprised.” – wildlife writer Ernest Thompson Seton
1973: The eastern cougar is declared endangered. But with no evidence of its existence at all, its status is fast on the way to extinct.
May 2006: A FedEx driver reports to the Vernon Township police in New Jersey that he found a mountain lion in his truck after making a delivery.
June 2006: Christine and Sean Fitzgerald hear “ungodlyscreaming” outside their house in Glenwood, New Jersey. Christine goes outside and sees a mountain lion with a cub. She calls to Sean, a Vernon Township policeman. Sean recalls the incident:
“My wife yelled, ‘Mountain lion.’ I grabbed my gun. We shined a flashlight at it. I got in the car and drove off the driveway and onto the grass by the woodline [about 20 yards from the animal] and shone my headlights on it. It didn’t do anything. I went back in the house. I told my wife, ‘I’m not going to shoot it. What are we going to do?’ I was new, I’m like, god if I call the guys on the midnight shift I’m never going to hear the end of it. I didn’t want to be known as the crazy guy that saw the mountain lion.”
State authorities tell the Fitzgeralds that they likely saw a rangy coyote or a golden retriever. “I’ve dealt with struck coyotes,” said Sean. “This was a big cat. It had that cat face, and it was huge. It was definitely a mountain lion.”
The next morning, the Fitzgeralds find dead bodies of a stray cat and three kittens – the source of the screaming – covered in pine needles and brush.
March 2011: After a five-year study, US Fish & Wildlife determines there is no reproducing population of mountain lions in these parts. The eastern cougar – on the endangered species list since the seventies – is declared extinct. Other than a patch in Florida’s Everglades, the mountain lion has been exterminated east of the Mississippi.
June 2011: A cougar is killed by a car on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. At first, authorities presume it is an escaped exotic pet. But an autopsy shows he was a wild young male that traveled halfway across the country from South Dakota, the first confirmed wild mountain lion in Connecticut in over a century. He is not an eastern cougar, but a western itinerant that roamed exponentially farther than mountain lions have ever been known to travel. His existence begs the question: what else don’t we know about the shyest creature in North America?
October 2011: Security guard Chris Homan sees a huge tan cat in Pawling, NY stalk across a narrow back road while patrolling in a Jeep shortly after midnight. At first he takes it to be a bobcat. “It took me by surprise how big it was. With the tail, it was probably like the length of the front of a car – the front bumper.”
“It happened real quick, it took me off guard. It crept down low, like a cat, and crept away. It was the tail that was very distinct, very long.”
Homan does some research and discovers the bobcat has a short tail. He concludes the animal he saw must have been a mountain lion. He also learns that mountain lions attack from above. “So I’ll look over my shoulder when I’m outside, but I’m not paranoid about it.”
November 2011: Weeks after Homan’s sighting, his co-worker, security guard Don Malone sees a mountain lion in the same area, on a tar and pebble road in Pawling, NY.
“I don’t think I’ve seen one, I’m sure I saw one,” says Malone, insulted by the phrasing of Dirt’s question. “Everyone else in the world thinks I didn’t see one.”
“It was a flash. I was driving on one of the roads at work. We have a speed limit of 10 miles an hour there. I turned one corner, and sure enough this thing in full extension jumped from a high bank on my right side and landed in the middle of the road. I can’t even say landed because he wasn’t down that long. He hit the middle of the road and jumped off to the left in one motion. He made 25 feet in one jump. As he jumped and landed you could see every muscle moving.”
The cat – lighter tan than a deer, with a body about four feet long and a tail about two and a half feet long – didn’t seem at all scared, says Malone, but rather annoyed by Malone’s presence. “He looked like I interrupted something. Like just my existence bothered him. This thing didn’t even look at me, no cock of the head, nothing. He was doing what he was doing. He saw me coming down the road and said I’m out of here. I was a cop for 20 years, so I know that look.”
Malone, on the other hand, was very scared. “The window was open. One of the first things I thought was, this thing is gonna kill me. This all happened in maybe a second a half. And I still am, at my place of employment, very wary of this now.”
Malone scoffs at the nonbelievers who sent him photos of bobcats, which he sees regularly. “Everybody’s trying to tell me it was [a bobcat] except for the fact it didn’t have spots and it had a long tail. It was very muscular. Not muscular like Schwarzenegger, more muscular like a marathon runner… A bobcat looks like a cat that got caught in your garbage can and got its tail cut off. The two aren’t even comparable. This thing is like the royalty of the cat family. The bobcat is like the garbage rat.”
“It’s okay everybody else thinks I’m crazy. I know what I saw. In fact I go out at night looking for this guy. I’m going to put a leash on him and drag him out to the people who laughed at me. On my regular patrols now, instead of looking in front of me, I look up.”
November 2011: Cyclist Wayne Gottlieb crests a hill and sees a large wild cat with a foot-long tail standing on Clinton Road in West Milford, between Wawayanda State Park and the Newark watershed. The cat bolts into the underbrush.
“Coyotes look like mangy dogs. This was a cat. It was at least as big as a big dog: 80 or 85 pounds. The tail was a cat-like tail. Not a coiled tail, a long tail that looked like it had some wave to it. It was multi-toned, mostly kind of golden brown with charcoal accents toward the back.
I’ve seen wild turkeys, foxes, coyotes, porcupines, bears. This doesn’t correspond to anything I’ve seen on the road.
I think it caught sight of me and the car that was coming the other way. I was pleased to see it was a little bit scared. I know my 85-pound black lab in her prime could take me off my feet.”
New Jersey’s 2011 black bear hunt will have come and gone by the time you read this. Hours before Dirt went to press, a hunter brought the first bear into the weigh station in Franklin County. In a way, the six-day open season will have been nothing new: the state held hunts in 2003, 2005, and 2010, killing a total of over 1,200 bears. But this year’s hunt will go down in history as the first time in 40 years that New Jersey sanctioned a bear hunt two years in a row.
Bears are New Jersey natives, but by the sixties, hunting had brought them to the verge of extinction in the area. When bear hunting ceased in 1971, the population began to rebound — slowly at first.
“I grew up in Sussex County in the eighties,” said Vernon police officer Sean Fitzgerald (whom Dirt interviewed about his mountain lion sighting in 2006), “and if somebody said they saw a bear, I’d probably say, ‘You’re crazy. There are no bears here.’”
Now, pictures of pug-nosed cubs, swimming or sleeping or climbing trees, appear in local newspapers as regularly as boy scouts. The population has doubled since 2005. Pre-hunt, there were about 3,400 bears in New Jersey, and they’ve been spotted in every county in the state.
Fitzgerald, who since his sighting has become the unofficial mountain lion expert on the police force, sees a parallel – separated by a few decades – between the bear’s repopulation of New Jersey and what’s happening with mountain lions today.
What goes up…
After a very short flight, a hot air balloon clipped treetops and crash landed in crowded Warwick Town Park the afternoon of Saturday, Nov. 26. A fleeing bystander got a picture, but no one seems to have ascertained the identity of the mysterious, cursing balloon operator before he rolled up his balloon and walked off. The Warwick Town Police have no record of it.
Tom Farkas of Hewitt was playing disc golf in the park when “the massive balloon came in very low and crashed into the trees right above the silver basket,” he wrote on a message board. “Several holes ripped in the sides of the balloon and the operator was screaming curses. They flew the balloon out of the trees and back into the air, but with the newly torn holes in it, it came down fast and hard. We literally ran off of the tee and into the road as the balloon crashed. I did manage to get a picture before I had to run.”
Another golfer described the sound of the balloon as it came down as “like a hundred leafblowers.”
The balloon isn’t from any commercial operation in the area, said Chris Healy, of Above the Clouds in Middletown, after seeing the pictures. Healy has flown 80 flights a season for a decade without incident, but “the great thing about ballooning is that something like this can happen, and you can still fly. You certainly want to land shortly thereafter.” To fly a balloon, you have to be certified by the Federal Aviation Administration and follow certain regulations – like maintaining a certain altitude.
Pennings Farm Market is a couple miles outside the village. Otherwise, these solar panels might not pass muster. Photo by MIKE BLOOM
Warwick Village: solar panels don’t jibe with historic district
Warwick Village may not want to see solar panels in front yards, side yards, front roofs, walls – or anywhere, really. The Village Board of Trustees is looking into relegating solar panels to rear yards and behind screens in the name of preserving aesthetics within the historic district.
“I think we have to regulate it but not create extreme costs for the homeowner,” said Mayor Michael Newhard.
Village attorney Michael Meth advised the board to write instructive guidelines, rather than regulations that discourage people from installing solar panels. “Go deep, [and] you could be a trendsetter,” he said.
Jerry Fischetti, who lives on Oakland Avenue, was the first in the historic district to install solar panels three years ago. After putting hot water panels on his north wall above the porch roof, he installed them on his rental property a few houses down. His neighbor across the street followed suit. His solar panels are visible from the street, if you’re looking.
“Tell them to mind their own business, because they’re not paying the bills,” said Fischetti. “Their concern is that this is within the historical district? If that’s the case then we should not use electricity. One hundred years ago, did they have electricity? Did they have all these amenities? Let’s go back 100 years and pay the same amount of tax we had then.”
Field trip from Amsterdam to Paris
I stumbled bleary-eyed down the gangplank to board the plane that would take me from Amsterdam to Paris, to connect to the plane that would take me home.
I’d been up all night, enjoying the offerings of Amsterdam, riding the giant Ferris wheel, getting harangued by a lingerie-clad prostitute for taking a picture of her silhouetted against her purple-lit window, and eventually grabbing a few Z’s on the church steps at the Occupy Amsterdam protest.
An ungainly sign stood in front of the ticket-taking desk. I almost fell over it. It said: “This KLM Flight uses BioFuel,” and had one of those QVC codes you could take a picture of with your smart phone, if you owned one, which I do not. The flight attendant who welcomes you aboard and makes sure you don’t plop down in an empty first class seat handed me a pamphlet. It was about the biofuel that the plane’s engine would be digesting during this flight. The pamphlet declared me a pioneer of aviation. Your modern day Amelia Earhart. I got to my seat, stuffed the pamphlet in the seatback pocket, and woke up at Paris’ flying saucer-looking airport.
A few days after my return home, it came back to me like a detail from a forgotten dream. One of those words that make you nod knowingly, until you realize you have no idea what it means: biofuel.
Dutch KLM’s website informed me that biofuel is made out of Used Cooking Oil, as if used cooking oil had – through its function as an Ingredient in a new and improved type of Jet Fuel – become prestigious enough to warrant its own proper noun.
The Boeing 737 Next Generation aircraft on which I’d been sleeping like a baby was one of the first commercial flights in the world to fly on a mixture of 50 percent conventional jet fuel and 50 percent biofuel. Biofuel apparently has a higher energy content, functions better in cold weather, and emits less carbon dioxide than conventional fuel. (The airline industry is responsible for two to three percent of manmade carbon emissions.) Eventually, KLM thinks it can reduce carbon emissions by half using biofuels.
Biofuel is made out of used vegetable oil picked up from restaurants. In a plant in Louisiana, the oil is hydro-treated and distilled into diesel. The plant, which is a joint venture between a fuel company and food giant Tyson, is capable of making fuel out of anything from seeds of the poisonous, tropical jatropha shrub to porcine fat. Yes, pigs could well fly.
Even though, at $17 per gallon, biofuel is exponentially more expensive than $3-per-gallon conventional fuel, it seems to be catching on. In the month after I took my place alongside the Wright brothers in the history books, Continental, Alaska Airlines and Lufthansa launched biofueled flights.
Still, cash is king, and it may be years — until the price of biofuel drops, or petroleum runs out — before we’re all flying around on Used Cooking Oil like the Boeing 737’s fearless (if sleeping) pioneers of aviation.
Buy organic and you’re (probably) not dealing with chemical residues. Buy local and you get fresher food and keep your farmer in business. But what to do when you have to choose one over the other?
Organic
Buying organic doesn’t necessarily mean buying certified organic. With locally grown produce, if you’re comfortable with the farmer and you know he’s not using pesticides, buying from him is preferable to trucking something that’s been picked across the country. You’re supporting the local economy, the food is fresher so antioxidant and nutritional levels are higher, and there are no toxic residues. Buying from a local certified organic farm is better still, because it gives you confidence that someone’s checking the farmer’s books. But if you’re buying from a farm that’s not certified organic and you don’t know the farmer, it’s buyer beware.
When consuming conventionally grown produce, it doesn’t matter if it’s grown locally or not; you’re still dealing with the potential of toxic pesticides. Food has to be nourishing and free of manmade chemical poisons, otherwise it’s a delivery system for something that’s going to have an aberrant effect on your health.
These chemical agents can disrupt hormone balance, inhibit digestive function, greatly add to body burden, and increase body toxicity. These chemicals may adversely affect the nervous system and contribute to abnormal cell growth.
We’re dealing with a chemical cocktail right now, particularly when it comes to “dirty foods” like blueberries and red peppers. We do not know the full extent of the potential damage caused by even one chemical pesticide on human biology, never mind the chemical cocktail used today.
The human body is always in a state of change. Cells are living and dying constantly, being monitored by complex processes, and now we’re ingesting poundages of chemical toxins that are pressuring the cells into aberration. That’s unnecessary. If you can avoid those toxins and take that pressure off of your system and all its trillions of cells, you’re going to be healthier.
If you are eating non-organic food, consider using herbal material to amplify detoxification enzymes in the body. One of the great herbs is turmeric, whose resins help the liver get rid of poisons. Ginger, spice herbs, and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli also help detoxification.
As Hippocrates, father of western medicine, instructed: Let food be your medicine, medicine be your food, and do no harm.
John Malatras owns Harvest Moon Health & Nutrition in West Milford
– As told to Becca Tucker
Local
Organic or local? I always ask, can’t we have it both ways? But okay, in the case that you can’t, which should you buy? I say local.
Say you go to a farm that’s local but not organic. You know the farmer, you know the place, and you know what methods they’re using. There are all sorts of reasons why that’s desirable even though it’s not organic. You’re looking at the person selling it to you; he’s part of your community.
Now here’s this thing called organic, it came from Chile or China. Even at a grocery store like Whole Foods, you’re going to see a whole lot of produce that comes from very far away. They advertise a lot about how much they get local produce. I’m in one of those pictures at the Whole Foods store because they’re selling my stuff, but the stuff on the other side of the aisle is from Chile.
Who the heck knows what those people are doing? I wouldn’t eat any produce grown in China because you read so much about how they cheat and use chemicals they shouldn’t use and all that. That’s an additional factor, when it comes from another country.
But say it comes from California and it’s really organic. It’s definitely a good thing that big huge farms in California are going organic. But I would still rather go to the farmers market right down the road and buy non-organic produce from the farmer.
Here in Pennsylvania, I can’t get organic apples except from one guy, and they’re not very good. I could get organic apples from Washington State; I can’t get them from Pennsylvania though. But there are a lot of people here who grow really great apples that are not organic. I buy a lot of apples from those guys, and bring them to farmers markets to sell. I know them, I know their families, I’ve been in their house, I don’t believe they would do anything dishonest. When they’re using pesticides, they’re doing it all legally. They wouldn’t take a chance on my health.
I can give you these apples from down the road that are cheaper and way better than organic apples from Washington State, but a lot of people will say they’re not touching my apples because they’re not organic. They want to know every single thing is certified organic. I kind of understand that attitude, but it’s just not that simple. They don’t want to have to think about it.
Jim Crawford owns New Morning Farm, a 95-acre organic farm in south-central Pennsylvania. He is president of the board of the Tuscarora Organic Growers
– As told to Becca Tucker
Corbett Hoffman, Goshen
All you need are milk producing breasts and a baby to nurse, but nursing can sometimes be a challenge that can be made a little easier. Here are a few favorite accoutrements that keep the process organic. I also want to take this opportunity to ask mothers to please nurse in public with your head high, knowing what you are doing is the essence of beauty.
Vicki keeps an angora bunny for its hair.
Asked why she spins, Vicki Botta invokes Gandhi. In perhaps the most iconic photo of the pioneer of civil disobedience, he is seated on a rug in lotus position, reading. In the foreground is a spinning wheel. Gandhi, who carried his spinning utensils in a box, pulled Indians together by getting them to spin their own cotton instead of buying clothes from the British. In the process, he found that the endlessly revolving whorl replenished his soul.
Vicki gets that feeling of spiritual release pedaling her spinning wheel in her Goshen living room, turning silk, flax, even long dog hair into yarn while her husband watches TV. She gets the feeling when she runs alpaca fleece through the sharp teeth of a comb in her studio upstairs, preparing it for spinning. “There’s something so soothing in washing a fleece,” she says. “It’s the same feeling as hanging washing out on a line. It forces you to do something that gives you time to think – if you want to think. We don’t do mundane tasks today. We pay other people to do them.”
Before she started making pouches, cowls, coats, sweaters, collars, mittens, double-sided blankets and ponchos, Vicki was hustling to meet deadlines at her graphic design job. Trying and failing to get pregnant for five years had left her depressed.
Then, staying at a cousin’s cabin in Maine, Vicki saw a little shuttle on the hearth. She climbed up on a loft, and there was the loom, along with every color of yarn under the rainbow. “This is my next thing,” Vicki knew.
Vicki didn’t realize it yet, but yarn entangles the roots of her family tree. Her great-great-grandmother Antonina, who grew up in Corlione, Italy, passed down a wooden bobbin that Vicki now has in her work room. Vicki’s grandmother worked in the garment industry. Vicki’s mom sewed Vicki’s wedding dress.
Vicki bought a $125 spinning wheel, quit her job, and joined a spinning group at Museum Village, where she met fascinating women like a falconer who had grown up on a dirt floor hut in Ireland. Over the years she acquired three different kinds of looms and 12 angora bunnies that she raised in a hatch in her backyard for their hair.
Her first project? Knitting three midnight blue sweaters, one for her, one for her husband, and one for the baby boy with whom she promptly got pregnant after she started spinning.
Drummer and sculptor Maxwell Kofi Donkor stirs up the spirit
So, you’re a Ghanian prince?
My father is the highest chief, the Asantehene, it means the king of the Asante. The Asante is the largest tribe in Ghana, and because I am one of his sons – there are ten of us children and six sons – I am a prince.
Now I know Kofi means Friday, because you were born on Friday. What is the language?
It’s Asante Twi. Twi is the wider language. We have four or five different languages but it’s all Twi.
Any thought of going back to rule the country?
I don’t think I would. I don’t think that is my personality. I have always been a different kind of leader — really in the trenches. And I am hoping to make a difference here, too. We have 13 acres where we are [in Greenville]. The goal is to build a nonprofit organization.
Tell us about the school you envision.
I don’t call it a school. It is a place of experience where people would come and learn to bring the arts to the world. The very old forms of art, folk art, are being lost. These are the foundational forms and some of them are not even recorded. It is sad.
So there will be a place where people would come and stay for a couple of days, not long, and have an experience with a master, like me. It would start from Africa. But I’m looking at other cultures, indigenous cultures, like Japan, Fiji, Aborigines, Native American. We would bring people here and they would take that experience with them and they would become a link so that we could reach out to the world.
The name of your drumming and dancing group is Sankofa. What does that mean?
It’s a symbol which looks like a bird whose neck is curved, looking the opposite way. My grandfather would always explain it this way, “Listen, you see the bird and you think it is looking at you, looking forward, but it’s looking backward. Literally translated, Sankofa means, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK to go back — but don’t stay back; don’t stay in the past.’” The past should be a springboard for you to look ahead.
You come from privilege, but you have always had a feeling for the underprivileged. Where did that come from?
My mom would bring home somebody from the street and have them stay with us and she took care of them. We worked on the farms with the laborers. We did everything that needed to be done in the house. And even though there were those in the house who were serving us, we never called them servants; we called them our brothers and our sisters.
What is it about you that compels all this self expression?
I would say, we, as people, as humans, we are made to express. We are vehicles of expression and everybody has a unique form of expression. If you don’t allow that part of you out, we create this kind of vacuum, or I should say, this storage. It is very vital that we express ourselves. There are some cultures that suppress that. We are preserving certain basic forms. These are foundational, creative forms of expression that I don’t want to see being stored in just the galleries.
In the forest just up the crest that overlooks Lusscroft Farm in Sussex can be found a peculiar structure with a history to match. In the 1930s James Turner, who owned the farm down the mountain, crafted the lodge as a gift for his brother William. Because of the grand view from this bluff, the building was named Outlook Lodge. The timbers for these walls and ceilings are the remains of some 25 antique Sussex County barns, and the floor boards are from an old grist mill that used to sit in Branchville.
Until the 1950s, Boy Scouts, 4-H members, Future Farmers of America and church groups used the lodge. In 1956 a kitchen and bathrooms were added, and the lodge became a dormitory building for forestry students of Cook College (now the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences) in the summer season. The forestry program deactivated in 1975. In 1996, due to lack of enrollment and mounting maintenance costs, the grounds closed for good.
Years of disuse find the lodge approaching collapse. There are some moisture issues, but the main problem is that the weight of the roof is too much for the structure of the building. It needs to be reinforced in order to last. But is this forlorn Frankenstein’s Monster of a building worth the sweat and money?
Its whimsical piecemeal construction may prove to be its saving grace. Some call the lodge one of the finest examples of arts and craft style architecture in New Jersey.
The farmland and lodge are now in the hands of the NJ State Park Service and the State Agricultural Development Committee, which, along with the Heritage and Agriculture Association, are planning to stabilize the old lodge and restore the deteriorating farm.
How quickly this year, the garden was painted with snow
the brown earth hidden, inch by inch,
its months of honest labor buried, its future put on hold.
Over by the fence, the limbs of the handsome pine tree
tremble already under the weight of the soggy flakes.
A couple of stars peer down with clinical gaze.
Paths as yet unswept. Few neighbors will venture out
until morning, I bet.
Inside the venerable stone building converted decades ago
to apartments for those of a certain age,
clearly visible at ground level,
a companion-cat (younger more vigorous than the tenants)
huddles, comically like his owner, close to the baseboard heat.
But way up high, where the roof is peaked,
and the windows wear hats,
an anxious face rimmed with scanty gray hair,
a fragile form, half-shadow, half-woman or man,
watches, dismayed, the insolent, fast developing storm,
and wonders if the poor little garden below,
that this newcomer has robber,
will ever be able to grow back again.
Laura Scribner, Goshen
Readers: Feeling stirred? Post your poetry at dirt-mag.com or email editor.dirt@strausnews.com. We’ll publish our favorite poem in the magazine.
Laura Scribner, Goshen
Readers: Feeling stirred? Post your poetry at dirt-mag.com or email editor.dirt@strausnews.com. We’ll publish our favorite poem in the magazine.
dirt 