{"id":1046,"date":"2009-09-11T07:08:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-11T11:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/09\/11\/man-vs-nature-in-the-champlain-valley\/"},"modified":"2009-09-11T07:08:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-11T11:08:00","slug":"man-vs-nature-in-the-champlain-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/09\/11\/man-vs-nature-in-the-champlain-valley\/","title":{"rendered":"Man vs. nature in the Champlain Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
The last couple of years, my wife Susan, my son Nicholas and I have been renovating an old brick farmhouse in the Champlain Valley.<\/p>\n

It’s been great fun, but in the way of such things we’ve learned to accept the setbacks and complications with the victories.<\/p>\n

Broken water lines, bat and mouse (and lady bug and spider) infestations, floods in the basement, poison ivy outbreaks, ticks, leaking roof, dog tangled in fence, furnace failure…<\/p>\n

Nothing teaches stoicism like a nearly century-old house — especially one surrounded and often invaded by wildlife.<\/p>\n

So the other morning, before dawn, I went into my son Nicholas’s room and saw a creature lying on the rug.<\/p>\n

It was nearly pitch dark and the animal — which seemed to be about the size of a large weasel — wasn’t moving.<\/p>\n

Great, I thought. What the heck is this thing? And how did it get in here?<\/p>\n

I approached stealthily and as my eyes adapted to the dark I saw the clear outline of white teeth.<\/p>\n

This looked worse than ladybugs.<\/p>\n

I thought of the helicopters which had been dropping rabies pellets up and down the valley the last couple of weeks.<\/p>\n

I thought of my boy sleeping in the bed a few feet away.<\/p>\n

I took another step and the creature didn’t move. Must be dead, right? Or waiting to pounce.<\/p>\n

Another step and I made out the thing’s scaly hide: a lizard, a big one. In the Adirondacks? We have black snakes galore around our garden — but iguanas?<\/p>\n

Another step — imagine me in full Marlin Perkins mode, man vs. nature — and I realized that I was stalking Nicholas’s toy tyrannosaurus rex.<\/p>\n

It grinned up at me with its big plastic jaws.<\/p>\n

Did I feel sheepish? A little.<\/p>\n

But my honest reaction was relief. In my book, discovering that we don’t have a t-rex infestation is reason to celebrate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last couple of years, my wife Susan, my son Nicholas and I have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[4818],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}