Myself and my horse have two good (human) friends. They are good friends and good people. They are *kind* people without the passing glance of a meanstreak between them. T. is in his 60s, has COPD relative to a workplace chemical accident when he was younger, grew up in a shockingly abusive household (his brother, when they were teenagers, shot and killed their father), and yet is about as soft and gentle as a flower, one of those tall, wavy kinds in the autumn. He has had custody of his son L. since L. was a wee baby. L.'s mother cannot and has never been able to make safe, consistent parenting choices. L. is 18, autistic with high support needs, and semi-verbal (he does not use a lot of direct conversational speech, a lot of spontaneous and mitigated echolalia). He is an utterly charming young man who adores horses and mine in particular. With time at the barn, he has come to tolerate chickens, and is willing to pet the cat. He is a great listener, kind and empathetic (like dad), and quite capable (he even got an award recently at his pre-voc program).
Unfortunately: they are also without stable, permanent housing and have been for sometime, indeed virtually all the five years I've known them. They were only placed in a shelter in early 2024 after T. Was hospitalized with pneumonia and L's mother had a breakdown while caring for him (for 5 days). The shelter staff, busy putting out fires (Massachusetts is a right to shelter state), have had little time for them and have been... Less than helpful to the point of being entirely cavalier about their situation.
The clock is short. Their shelter ends on October 11th and they have to leave. They currently have nowhere to go except to pay out of pocket for a hotel while they re-apply to the shelter system. Winter is incoming, faster than we think in days of sun and 70s.
I am searching DESPERATELY for any safe place - it doesn't even need to be permanent - for them to spend the winter. Southern Worcester County, southwest Middlesex, in Massachusetts (US) basically in that corner bounded by route 9 and the Pike to the north and 495 to the east. Close enough (within about 15 miles) for L. to take the van to school. Ideally, two bedrooms with a bathroom and kitchenette facilities (hard to feed a teenager on takeout - shelters don't allow microwaves or even fridges). Less ideally one bedroom. They will even take a safe spot with water hookup for a trailer.
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On this gloomy day, I visited Valley Falls with my tripod and my neutral density (ND) filters.
It wasn’t snowy and it wasn’t too cold, so I spent the afternoon taking photos of the falls.
I’m always looking at the different textures of leaves and rocks when I’m taking photos. I try to provide a few shots grounding the viewer with the little things in my immediate surroundings.
I set up my tripod down river and caught some softer long-exposure shots of the water.
The ND filter I used gave a tinge of a violet overlay, especially on the rocks there.
I love the way these long-exposure shots catch that probably of bubbles and trickles forming a soft cloud.
The rapids downstream from the waterfall formed interesting shapes, especially with the long-exposure.
While I was there, of course I needed to give some attention to the actual waterfall.
I experimented with my color settings to show that contrast with Valley Falls and its iconic center stone.
I finished taking shots at the first waterfall drop upstream. That ash tree on the left side has since been removed to help slow down ash borer beetles in our area.
Great Appalachian Towns, Volume 1: Grafton, West Virginia.
This historic rail hub on the Tygart Valley River, like so many Appalachian towns, helped fuel the country's astounding growth in the early Twentieth Century, only to watch its prosperity slip away in the second half of the century as demand for glass, pottery, and coal diminished and automation displaced mining jobs. Fascinating web site here about Carr China, one of the companies that thrived in the area during the early part of the Twentieth Century, as well as an abbreviated history of Grafton. Walking tour here for railroad buffs and cryptid hunters (every town in Appalachia seems to have its own paranormal beast/mascot).
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I read this article years ago and what's being done to our entire country has reminded me of it. I have a feeling the results are going to be even worse than bear attacks this time. Highly recommended reading.
The article is an overview of the book A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
Libertarians took over the small town of Grafton, New Hampshire in 2004 and started scaling back the government and cutting taxes.
When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
Article excerpt below
They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right.
Black bears, it should be stressed, are generally a pretty chill bunch. The woods of North America are home to some three-quarters of a million of them; on average, there is at most one human fatality from a black bear attack per year, even as bears and humans increasingly come into contact in expanding suburbs and on hiking trails. But tracking headlines on human-bear encounters in New England in his capacity as a regional journalist in the 2000s, Hongoltz-Hetling noticed something distressing: The black bears in Grafton were not like other black bears. Singularly “bold,” they started hanging out in yards and on patios in broad daylight. Most bears avoid loud noises; these casually ignored the efforts of Graftonites to run them off. Chickens and sheep began to disappear at alarming rates. Household pets went missing, too. One Graftonite was playing with her kittens on her lawn when a bear bounded out of the woods, grabbed two of them, and scarfed them down. Soon enough, the bears were hanging out on porches and trying to enter homes.
Combining wry description with evocative bits of scientific fact, Hongoltz-Hetling’s portrayal of the bears moves from comical if foreboding to downright terrifying. These are animals that can scent food seven times farther than a trained bloodhound, that can flip 300-pound stones with ease, and that can, when necessary, run in bursts of speed rivaling a deer’s. When the bears finally start mauling humans—attacking two women in their homes—Hongoltz-Hetling’s relation of the scenes is nightmarish. “If you look at their eyes, you understand,” one survivor tells him, “that they are completely alien to us.”
What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”
Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem. The bears, for their part, were left to navigate the mixed messages sent by humans who alternately threw firecrackers and pastries at them. Such are the paradoxes of Freedom. Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem.
