The shambles

It's sad to see summer ending. Our seasonal residents are draining the water systems, putting up the shutters, buttoning down the boathouse, preparing to face again whatever brutal realities they may have sought to escape in the mountains. But as long as the roof stays on and the crick don't rise, they can at least stop worrying about the summer place until next spring. Not so, the twelve-month resident. North Country houses disintegrate with the unceasing predictability of trans-uranic isotopes. A furnace has a half-life of ten years; after twenty it can hardly heat a cup of coffee. The leeches have been at the leach field, ice has chewed the shingles, mice worry away at the wires, and the water tap drips... drips... drips... It's enough to put me in mind of Yeats: "things fall apart, the center cannot hold," or the New Testament, the shortest verse of which reads: "Jesus wept."

Still, I couldn't abide a new-built house, unless I was fool enough and rich enough to design my own. A yard needs at least one tree grown tall enough to have been killed by lightning, just to keep the woodpeckers off the clapboards. A real home requires the sweat and folly of generations. It grows by slow accretion, like a termite mound. It acquires an essential patina of baby barf and dog hair, burnt bacon and tracked-in road salt. And all it asks in return is constant attention and every penny you can scrape together for the rest of your natural life.

Get it fresh

Hope you're tuned in to String Fever this afternoon--NCPR veteran Danny Gotham is on with Barb Heller--unless, of course, you are listening to live music somewhere. No matter how good the medium, music is like corn on the cob, it should be eaten fresh from the field. You can catch Danny farm-fresh on Saturday at the Edwards Opera House, along with another familiar face in the North Country, John Kribs. Terry and I gave ourselves a pre-birthday treat on Sunday at the Ottawa Folk Festival, hearing the likes of Eliza Gilkyson, Iris DeMent, Greg Brown and Dar Williams. Rained all day, but still way better than a digital download. Music is a communal art form, both in the performance and the consumption, and has been since people whacked together mastodon bones and ululated. So lose the headphones and head out where the music plays.

Accept no imitations

News director Martha Foley and Paul Smiths professor Dr. Curt Stager have been keeping our eye on the sparrow--and on the sparrowhawk--for over twenty years. Their conversations about the natural world, heard on Natural Selections and its predecessor Field Notes, have taken listeners into space and under the sea, into the invisible world of microbes, and into their own backyards--unscrewing the inscrutabilities of nature in an engaging and accessible manner. Having been carried by member stations around the country and by Armed Forces Radio, Natural Selections was our first offering when NPR launched its member-station podcast project earlier this year. Since then more than 10,000 listeners have downloaded programs to their iPods or other digital gear. Nearly 300 episodes can be heard on our Natural Selections page.

Here is a little poem inspired by today's episode of Natural Selections:

In Dispraise of Imitation

No matter how sincere you find the flattery,
the rat-tailed maggot is a loathsome thing.
Grown into a drone fly and decked just like a bee,
still it makes no honey, still it bears no sting.

Now you hold the mic on me

As a media organization, we are used to being the ones who ask the questions. But at a time when most institutions, from government to media to business, seem to be increasingly opaque to public scrutiny, it's easy to forget that what we do, as well as how and why we do it, are matters of legitimate public concern. The mistrust that results from the unwillingness of many to operate transparently is extended to all. Why does NCPR carry this program and not that program? How does the news department decide what to cover and when? How is NCPR funded and how does that effect what we do? How do our relationships with NPR and other national and international partners work? These are some of the questions we address on-air in our regular "Ask the Station" call-ins, such as the one coming up Tuesday at 11 am. We also address them individually day to day. Ask us anything anytime, via our toll-free number, the station's email address, the listener comment page at ncpr.org, or by post or fax. Whatever we receive before this Tuesday will help to shape the conversation.