Chapter Ten: Dog Biscuits and Dandelions
In addition to licorice, ice cream, and salt-water taffy one of my favorite snacks of summertime was MilkBone Dog Biscuits.
At least it was when I was about eight years old. My reasoning was simple. Dogs like biscuits. I like dogs. I like biscuits. Therefore, I must like dog biscuits.
My acquired taste amused my grandmother, but she did not object. In fact, she encouraged my strange habit by buying me a small box of MilkBone Dog Biscuits.
My mother, on the other hand, was not nearly so appreciative of my diet choice.
To put it politely, she panicked when she picked me up at the end of summer. I can still recall the shouting match that erupted between them over my dietary habits.
My mother screamed at her mother, "You gave him what?
"How could you give him dog biscuits for God's sake?"
"Oh, there's no need to worry. The treats are nutritious, and he likes them, and so does the dog. Besides, it ain't killed either of them yet," was my grandmother’s pragmatic reply.
Thank goodness, my appetitive for dog treats diminished over the winter.
As I was writing this book, I decided on a lark, to try a nibble out of a dog biscuit, just for old time's sake.
It was nothing less than God-awful. It was like chewing on dust-flavored particleboard.
Then I read the list of ingredients (something I should have done before conducting the taste test):
Wheat Flour, Wheat Bran, Beef Meal, Beef Bone Meal, Milk, Wheat Germ, Beef, Tocopherols, Poultry By-Product Meal, Lamb Meal, Salt, Chicken Meal, Dried Beef Pulp, Dicalcium Phosphate, Bacon Fat, BHT, D-Activated Animal Sterol, Propyl-Gallate, Citric Acid, Brewers Dried Yeast, Whey, Choline Chloride, Dl-Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate, Calcium Pantothenate, Riboflavin, Malted Barley Flour, Casein, Sodium Metabisulfite, Zinc Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Copper Sulfate, Ethylenediamine Dihydriodide, Soy Lecithin, Iron Oxide, and more.
Iron oxide? I think that's just a fancy name for rust.
I don't even want to know what Animal Sterol is. It's amazing that I even survived childhood.
My other adventure in questionable food groups was an attempt to brew a batch of Dandelion Wine.
Back in the day, illicit intoxicants such as beer and wine were difficult to obtain - especially when you were only eight years old.
The difficulty was further increased by the fact my grandmother was a lifelong member of the local temperance society.
My friend and I had heard other adults talking about Dandelion Wine and how s-m-o-o-t-h and tasty it was.
We decided to make a batch, just for us. I mean how difficult it could be?
According to my "research" (talking to a friend of a friend who was in high school), all we needed were dandelions, yeast, water, a crock-pot, and a few weeks for it all to ferment.
The yeast I could get from my grandmother's kitchen. Dandelions were knee deep in the backyard; there were several old mason posts in the barn. Water was accessible.
With youthful enthusiasm, we set about collecting dandelions - roots and all. After about an hour, we had enough to fill the mason pot.
We carefully shook out most of the dirt and tossed the wilting flowers and green leaves into the pot along with a package of purloined yeast and a few gallons of water.
We then hid the vat in the back of the barn and let it brew for a few weeks. We forgot about it until summer was nearly over.
In late August, we decided to check out our handy work.
The yeasty stench of rotting and fermenting dandelions greeted us when we lifted the lid off the mason pot. The broth was a sickening mass of gray-green froth and a foul-smelling liquid with a faint whiff of alcohol. It smelled bad enough that we thought it had to be real booze.
I dared him to take the first sip. He then doubled-dared me to try it. I responded with a triple-dare. After a few minutes of escalating dares back and forth to the Nth degree, we decided to each take a taste at the same time.
Human evaluation is a beautiful thing, and the gag-reflex evolved to keep our ancestors from poisoning themselves with their own stupidity. Our reflexes were in tip-top shape as disgust gave way to unrelenting waves of nausea. We each barfed up breakfast and at least a few meals from the week before.
To say our concoction was appalling would be a world-class understatement.
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August is the blur at the end of summer. The long lazy days of a school vacation, which seemed endless in June and July, suddenly begin to fly by. September, once barely visible on the horizon is approaching with the speed of an express train.
As a kid growing up in Kingston, I hated and loved August. I hated the thought of the end of summer and a long winter with my mother.
But I loved what August brought. For me, August was the month of Dust Devils, and Thunder Math.
Movie stars may dance with wolves, but I pranced with dust devils. My grandmother ran an open-air parking lot at Duxbury Beach and flat sand parking lots are ideal breeding grounds for dust devils. Once when I was about seven or eight, I can remember chasing a group of dust devils around the parking lot for nearly an hour.
A dust devil looks like a micro-tornado, complete with the classic funnel cloud and whirling vortex. I got a thrill running into the funnel clouds and feeling the sandpaper sting of windblown dust swirling around me.
I had no idea of the physics behind the phenomena, but in my young mind, I had a hunch they were semi-living creatures. If anything, the science is more interesting.
Dust devils are most common in flat areas where the sun beats down. Deserts and parking lots are ideal. Sand is a lousy conductor of heat and a thin layer of hot air just above the surface forms and sets the stage for the dance of the sun devils.
As the sun heats the ground, a thin layer of hot air gradually forms and grows into a bubble. As the air temperature at ground level rises, the growing bubble of hot air tries to rise up through the cooler, and heavier air above the ground. But there is resistance. The air above doesn’t want to get out of the way. Layers of air have a natural quality to remain static, which acts like the surface tension of water. While the surface tension is fairly strong – it does have a breaking point.
As the bubble of hot air grows and its upward pressure increases, the limits of atmospheric stability are reached. All that is needed is an event to tip the balance and break the stalemate. A minor gust of wind, the motion of a passing car, or even the footsteps of a young boy is enough to set a dust devil free.
The sudden release of a hot air bubble sets into play a chain of events that create your typical dust devil. As the hot air bubble rises, surface air moves in to replace it. The horizontal mass of inward moving air begins to spin at the bottom of the newly forming funnel.
You can see this process at work every time you drain the bathtub. Instead of a funnel of water going down the drain, we have a funnel of hot air draining upward into the cooler air above and a dust devil is born. They may last less than a minute up or can endure for hours. The winds of dust devils are snail-pace slow compared to their big brother tornados. Speeds of 25-30 MPH are typical although there are records of enthusiastic dust devils with whirling winds approaching 70 MPH.
Dust devils liked to travel in packs. Conditions favorable for the formation of one dust devil tend to give birth to many brothers and sisters. Sometimes I’ve seen packs of upward to a dozen siblings following along behind a senior dust devil. Watching them, play tag was always a special treat.
The other gift of August was its thunderstorms. The fireworks at the Marshfield Fair were nothing compared to a good August thunderstorm.
As a kid, I used to sit in the backyard surrounded by fireflies and watch the dark skies light up with displays of ‘heat lightning.' (Actually ‘heat lightning’ is a myth – what folks used to call heat lightning is actually flashes of lightning from storms below the horizon and too far away for the thunder to travel.)
My father taught me a trick to measure my distance away from a lightning storm and the length of a lightning bolt. I still use this trick today. Here’s how it works. You start to count, Mississippi-one, Mississippi-two, Mississippi-three, etc. as soon as you see a lightning flash. You stop counting as soon as you hear the rumble of thunder. The time it takes for the sound to reach your ears will tell you how far away the storm is.
At sea level, the velocity of sound is about 770 mph or roughly 1,125 feet a second. To keep it simple, sound travels at 1,000 a second and five seconds equals one mile. Thus a flash followed by a boom between Mississippi-four and Mississippi-five means the storm is about a mile away.
If you want to know the approximate length of the lightning bolt, start counting when you hear the rumble of thunder and stop when it ends. The time in seconds multiplied by 1,000 will give you the approximant length of a lightning bolt.
A few words about storm safety – never take shelter under a tree during a storm. Lightning likes to take the shortest path to ground, and your tree just might be it. Lightning’s shortest path could become an expressway to heaven.
One sign that there’s a lightning strike pending is a build-up of static electricity on your body. Once when I was a teen, I was watching a grand display of lightning from a window in my grandmother’s attic when the hair on my arms and the back of my hand started to rise.
I quickly stepped back from the window just as there was a blinding flash of light and a deafening CRACK!
A tree about 150 feet away split down the middle when the bolt struck. The same instant the bolt hit the tree, a brilliant blue electrical spark snapped from the radiator to my elbow. I like my thunderstorms up-close and personal, but not so personal that the strikes carry my initials.