Friday, 6:30 AM. 34 degrees, wind W, light to calm. The sky is overcast and it has been raining lightly. The barometer predicts partly cloudy skies. It is a damp, gray day, but yet with a hint of spring.
I took the church’s lawn mower (I volunteer to mow the parsonage lawn) to Axel’s implement repair shop in Ashland yesterday afternoon to get it ready for the coming season, and pulling up with the truck a gentleman about my own age who was dropping off a snow blower offered to help me lift the heavy mower down from the back of the truck, and I readily accepted. I then told him I owed him a return favor, and we both started talking about barter in times past. He is a retired area dentist, and told me how over the years he had accepted everything from fresh whitefish to furnace repair in return for dental work. I recalled trading blue spruce trees for our wedding cake forty years ago, and bartering trees and landscaping to have our first house painted. No income taxes were paid, no money changed hands in these long-ago barter schemes, and some were a lot of fun. I also remember, in more difficult and distant times, that my grandparents’ country doctor was often paid in chickens and apples. And, he made house calls!
On the way home in the late afternoon I saw two deer browsing along the west side of Highway 13, two miles south of town, the first I have seen since deer season. By the time I stopped the truck and grabbed the camera they were gone. Also of note, the Duluth evening news had a photo of a cougar up a tree down in Spooner, Wisconsin, about two hours southwest of Bayfield, and that reminds me that we have had several cougar sightings hereabouts in the past few years along Pike’s Creek, near where I just saw the deer.
It occurs to me that all of nature, what we call the balance of nature, is just one huge barter system. So many measures of aspen shoots and acorns are bartered for a deer herd; Eighteen to twenty deer are bartered for the annual presence of an adult wolf; so many deer for that cougar down in Spooner (or padding along Pikes’s Creek) and so on, each habitat a web of interconnected bartering schemes. When there are too many deer, or the weather is poor, the aspen and oak cannot support the deer herd and they become scarce, and the deer population crashes, and the starving predators follow suit. If the predators become too numerous the deer herd is reduced below its carrying capacity for the number of predators, and a crash occurs at the top of the food chain. The so-called balance of nature is not the balance we think of when we look at a pendulum clock, tick-tocking evenly and pleasantly, on through the endless hours. It is more often like that famous economic house of cards we all are talking about at present, building up higher and higher and becoming more and more complicated until a weakness occurs somewhere in the fragile structure and it all comes crashing down, to be built up card by card all over again. Now I ask the question: does nature emulate Wall Street? Of course not, it is the other way around. So we unwitting human cards, in our fragile house of the same name, from time to time come tumbling down, and have to start all over again. Can a human economic system be devised that will be balanced to the degree that the house never collapses? We haven’t produced one yet, and being far less intelligent as a species than nature in its collective enterprise, I doubt we ever shall. So, it may be back to barter for a while.
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