snow piles puffy pillows

snow piles puffy pillows

on limbs, plasters black tree trunks,

cloaks the bowing cedars

Late December surprise, lightning and thunder at night, heavy rain drumming on the roof, freezing by morning, turning to sleet, then driven by a northerly into a ground blizzard all day. I crawl into town, squirreling around corners and sliding through an intersection. On the way home, the wind blasts the snow into opaque billows, obscuring the road. I'm the only one on the road, so I creep down the yellow center line, barely visible under snow on top of ice. At our turnoff, the truck starts up the first gravel hill and stops halfway, wheels spinning in place. Slowly, carefully, I back down, trying not to slide off into the ditch, and park the truck by the mailboxes. I'm not dressed for trekking in a blizzard and the wind quickly cuts through to the skin. But cold, wet hands don't stop me from pulling out my camera to record the beauty of the snow -- white plaster on the north side of black tree trunks, puffy white pillows piled on every limb, cedars bowing under white cloaks. Half a mile from home, I hear a strange roar. Could it be the wind? Well, in a way, yes. It's our wind turbine, the blades a blur, the tail cocked sideways, the tall tower bending in the gale. My thin socks have slipped down inside my boots and when I take the shortcut to the house through deeper snow, I quickly get snow on my bare ankles. So I'm really glad to get home to our warm soapstone wood stove and a hot cup of peppermint tea.

a bat trapped inside

a bat trapped inside 

echolocates its way to

the open window

Friday the thirteenth, a time of new beginnings. Playing the Maya turtle ocarina finally brought rain today, a soft, soaking, spring rain. Standing in the kitchen early this morning, looking out at the saturated hues of green, I catch something dark falling down on the other side of the window. A leaf? But it seems to be inside the sun room, not outside. I open the sliding glass door and immediately a small winged creature begins fluttering back and forth the length of the sun room. A bird? No, the movements are too quick. A bat then. 
          But how did it get in? All the windows are closed. Thinking fairly quickly for this early, I go out on the porch, remove the screen from one of the windows on the east end and open the window. The bat flies toward the windows but lands just above the closed window, clinging to the wooden frame. With a broom I gently coax the bat to start flying again, but it keeps missing the open window. Getting the message, I crank the other window open wide and this time the bat echolocates the opening and swoops out. Now we're wondering if the sounds we've been hearing above our heads are not squirrels or mice but a colony of bats that have been wintering between the roof and the ceiling. But how did this one get into the downstairs sun room?
          Bats are mysterious, but also beautiful and useful. I have always loved watching their graceful acrobatic flight on warm evenings as they catch enormous quantities of harmful insects, consuming a third of their body weight in half an hour. Coincidentally, this year is the Year of the Bat, as proclaimed by Bat Conservation International, and this week, 9-12 April, is Bat Awareness and Appreciation Week. I'm right in tune with the times, my early morning experience making me aware and also appreciative of bats, whether in or around our home.
          Bats continue to be in the news because of the threat of white-nose syndrome, a cold-loving fungus that has killed at least one million hibernating North American bats in the Northeast since 2006 and is spreading westward. In the rain-dark light this morning, I didn't notice whether our bat had a white nose. If it did hibernate in our house, it would certainly have been warmer than in a cave or one of the bat houses we have attached to our sheds. However, I will report our errant bat to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, which is collecting information about unusual behavior in bats in the early spring when they emerge from hibernation, such as difficulty flying and flying during the daytime. Our little bat seemed to be flying normally and I'm sure it was flying in the daytime only because we disturbed its sleep.
          My other concern for the bats is our new wind turbine because a number of bat deaths have been reported under wind turbines. Researchers have found that the majority of bats were killed because a sudden drop in air pressure near blades caused injuries to the bats' lungs, called barotrauma. Respiratory systems in birds can withstand such drops but bat lungs cannot. Fortunately, scientists have shown that slowing turbine blades to near motionless in low-wind periods significantly reduces bat mortality. This makes sense because bats don't like to fly when it's really windy, which is when the turbines are reaping the most energy. So this system would be a boon for both bats and the production of energy from the wind. Hurray!

hoisting the wind turbine

hoisting the wind turbine

into the blue sky, three blades

catching the wind

On Halloween day, the wind turbine is up at last. It's been eleven months since we purchased the Bergey GVFX3524 and three solar panels. We celebrated this trick with treats: apple cider and homemade cookies.

On the ides of December last year, the parts for the wind turbine arrived in the snow. They sat in their cardboard boxes all winter and through the extremely wet spring.

In late May John began clearing wild blackberry bushes and thorn trees from the wind turbine site southwest of our house.

All through the extremely hot, dry summer, John dug five five-foot deep holes for the guy wire footings, chipping away at the rock-hard clay with a pick ax. A cement truck came out the last week of August to pour the 3 1/2 foot concrete footings as well as the foundation for the power equipment shed. 

A week later on the first of September, a young couple came out to move a little garden shed to the wind turbine site. This shed would house the power equipment: batteries, charge controller and inverter. John cleared a path through the woods, but he forgot to measure the width of the roof, so he and the two movers had to cut branches and a few small trees to squeeze the shed through.

Sliding the shed onto the foundation on rollers was tricky and required a lot of maneuvering with a fork lift to get it straight without slipping off.

By the end of September, the guy wires and gin pole for lifting the wind turbine tower are up and the poles for the tower have been connected. The solar panels propped against the shed are conditioning the batteries. Later, they'll be mounted on permanent racks.

In October John and our neighbor, also John, raise the turbine tower without the turbine attached, to test the winch and all the guy wires. This takes 3 1/2 hours, with the two men taking turns cranking the winch with a gigantic wrench. Then it's lowered again. John puts the internal wiring in place and attaches the turbine. Then he waits for a day that's not raining or too windy for the final raising. On the last day of October, a hot Indian Summer day, John and John go to work again cranking the winch.

John has to clear some more branches as the turbine starts to go up.  

Turbine half-way up, gin pole halfway down.

This time it takes only 1 1/2 hours. Up, but not quite straight at the top!

John has to open some of the malleable wire rope clips, tighten some of the wires and loosen others until the pole is straight from bottom to top. Now the only thing left to do is the power wiring, which gets the power into and out of the batteries. This will help us get off of coal and oil, and for that we'll be able to celebrate every windy and/or sunny day.

long gray blades slowly

long gray blades slowly 

revolving in the sunset,

reaping the wind

East of the Mississippi near Bishop Hill, we pass a huge wind farm, hundreds of giant turbines spread out for miles south of the interstate highway, slowly revolving like a troupe of ballerinas all doing arabesque pirouettes. Like a three-bladed scythe, the long blades reap wind instead of grass. The kinetic energy garnered from the motion of the wind is converted into mechanical energy, which is then used to produce electricity, an alternative to coal-generated electricity. Seeing all these turbines reminds me of the wind farms we saw in many parts of the UK, like this one in Cumbria. Of course, as with anything new, controversy blows hot around wind farms, ranging from spoiling the view to the environmental impact of producing massive amounts of concrete for the footings. As a child, I remember driving from St. Louis to grandma's house in southern Illinois past mile after mile of oil derricks bobbing up and down like demented ducks, and no one objected to spoiling the view in order to suck oil out of the ground, or to the endless lines of railroad cars carrying coal from the mines out west to the cities out east.