John Pelican * Ebert’s Appreciation * Fogged by pesticide

Farmers dust fruit trees with lead arsenate in a Door County orchard.

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John Pelican * 

Mumbling  dog tricky named after all creatures great and small  tall  sweatpants up above knees  dirty bare feet  

Ebert’s Appreciation * 

In Life Itself, Roger Ebert reflects on one of his primary influences, a UIUC English professor Curley  

I was to take every class Curley offered, including Fiction Writing› where one of the other students was Larry Woiwode, then obviously already the real thing. Curley read our stories aloud anonymously, to encourage open discussion. There was never any doubt who wrote Woi-wode's. Curley introduced me to many of the cornerstones of my life's reading: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, The Ambassadors, Nostromo, The Professor's House, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury. One day he handed out a mimeographed booklet of poems by E. E. Cummings, and told us to consider the typography as musical notations for reading the poems aloud. Cummings ever after was clear to me, and I know dozens of his poems by heart.

He approached these works with undisguised admiration. We discussed felicities of language, patterns of symbolism, motivation, revelation of character. This was appreciation, not the savagery of deconstruction, which approaches literature as pliers do a rose

Fogged by pesticide 

While I was cycling just east of Egg Harbor on my way back from the other side of the peninsula, I got fogged with pesticide by some machines in the cherry orchard. 

Article in Door County Pulse

Those were the days when thousands of workers migrated to Door County each season to harvest, Schuster said, well over 10,000 acres of cherry orchards, 2,000 acres of apples and scatterings of pears. 

“And all of these were sprayed with lead arsenate for years and years and years,” he said.

Orchard owners mixed lead-arsenate powder – lead and arsenic combined – with water and sprayed the soluble solution on apple and cherry trees to control pests. It was a licensed product and legal chemical, approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), prescribed by the University of Wisconsin-Extension, and widely used from the 1890s to the 1960s, according to the Wisconsin Department of Trade, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (DATCP). The EPA would ban the product in 1988 but in the meantime, pests grew resistant to the chemical cocktail, requiring the application of more and more lead arsenate. 

We’ve been using this quote of Maya Angelou’s for the last year: ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better,’” said Laurel Duffin Hauser, Crossroads former executive director and current development director.

Lead and arsenic naturally occur in soil, but that background level is generally lower than areas where the pesticides were used, according to DATCP. Even the former orchard land where the pesticides were sprayed typically don’t have concentrations high enough to cause “immediate negative health effects,” according to DATCP.