Free Ebook Flying Blind: One Man's Adventures Battling Buckthorn, Making Peace with Authority, and Creating a Home for Endangered Bats, by Don Mitche
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Flying Blind: One Man's Adventures Battling Buckthorn, Making Peace with Authority, and Creating a Home for Endangered Bats, by Don Mitche
Free Ebook Flying Blind: One Man's Adventures Battling Buckthorn, Making Peace with Authority, and Creating a Home for Endangered Bats, by Don Mitche
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When Middlebury writing professor Don Mitchell was approached by a biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department about tracking endangered Indiana bats on his 150-acre farm in Vermont's picturesque Champlain Valley, Mitchell's relationship with bats—and with government—could be characterized as distrustful, at best.
But the flying rats, as Mitchell initially thinks of them, launched him on a series of "improvements" to his land that would provide a more welcoming habitat for the bats—and a modest tax break for himself and his family. Whether persuading his neighbors to join him on a "silent meditation," pulling invasive garlic mustard out of the ground by hand, navigating the tacit ground rules of buying an ATV off Craigslist, or leaving just enough honeysuckle to give government inspectors "something to find," Mitchell’s tale is as profound as it is funny—a journey that changes Mitchell’s relationship with Chiroptera, the land, and, ultimately, his understanding of his own past.
Ruminating on the nature of authority, the purview of the state, and the value of inhabiting one’s niche—Mitchell reveals much about our inner and outer landscape, in this perfectly paced and skilled story of place.
- Sales Rank: #1820325 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-10-15
- Released on: 2013-09-27
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
Bats used to give Mitchell “the willies.” Then a bat biologist turned up at his Vermont farm with a request to trap some bats, and in his first night netted two endangered Indiana bats. A few years later Mitchell retired from teaching and began to work his farm again, enrolling it in a forest-management plan specifically targeted to help the bats. By then, white-nose syndrome, a largely fatal disease of hibernating bats, had invaded Vermont, and anything to help the bats was getting government funding. So the 1960s countercultural Mitchell, who had initially bought his farm to live off the land and away from any government interference, discovered himself getting more and more enmeshed. The forestry plan to help bats began to dovetail with the requirement to remove the invasive buckthorn and garlic mustard that were appearing in his woods; so to reduce his taxes and improve the forests for the bats, Mitchell had to play by the government’s rules. --Nancy Bent
Review
“So what happened to the idealistic ’60s youth who went back to the land? Flying Blind is one couple’s answer. Don Mitchell presents a rich, evocative account of wise stewardship—and of how making ends meet on a Champlain Valley farm in Vermont becomes a conservation success story in the fight to save endangered Indiana bats.”--Andrew Walker, executive director, Bat Conservation International
“Don Mitchell has written a classic story of Vermont, of family, of farming, and of the evolving, never-romantic, always crucial story of the encounter between people and the larger world.”--Bill McKibben, author of Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
“In Flying Blind, Don Mitchell not only gives us a wonderful story about creating habitat for bats on his land, but tells about his own personal journey of becoming a bat-loving conservationist. In addition to the many scientific bat-conservation efforts taking place around the world, we also need stories like this—of an individual developing a greater understanding of bats, and of the natural world, and coming away better for it.”--Merlin Tuttle, founder, Bat Conservation International
"Receiving a government grant to control invasive plants in the bat habitat around his farm was just the beginning. Don Mitchell hilariously chronicles the official visits and requirements that soon became such a prominent part of his life, along with the stupefying labor involved in grubbing up all that garlic mustard. What makes Flying Blind such a remarkably powerful memoir is Don Mitchell’s capacity to connect both the ecological puzzle of bats’ susceptibility to white-nose syndrome and a personal resistance to bureaucracy with his passionate and lifelong resistance to authority. At the deepest level, this is a story about how forgiveness and celebration help him find a trail through the woods to family and home."--John Elder, author of The Frog Run and coeditor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing
“Don Mitchell’s Flying Blind does for rural New England what Wendell Berry’s essays do for Kentucky and Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It does for the American West. On one level, Flying Blind tells the engaging and often hilarious story of a man’s determination to make his upcountry Vermont farm a welcoming home for an endangered and much-maligned species of ‘flying rat.’ It’s also the story of how place, the past, family, and meaningful work can still form character at a time when much of America is increasingly alienated from nature, history, and community. Beautifully written, relentlessly honest, and unfailingly entertaining, Flying Blind is the book Don Mitchell was born to write.”--Howard Frank Mosher, author of The Great Northern Express, Walking to Gatlinburg, and On Kingdom Mountain
About the Author
Don Mitchell is a novelist, essayist, and sometime screenwriter whose most recent books are The Nature Notebooks (a novel) and a guidebook to Vermont in the Fodor’s/Compass American series. He’s also the architect and builder of over a dozen low-cost, energy-efficient structures on Treleven Farm, and a shepherd with thirty-five years’ experience managing a flock of sheep there. One of his current interests is forest management with the goal of enhancing habitat for endangered bats.
From 1984 to 2009 Don taught courses at Middlebury College, primarily in creative writing–especially narrative fiction and writing for film–and environmental literature. Now he devotes most of his time to projects designed to enhance the farm and support the vision of Treleven, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Charming but misses the mark
By Pyewacket
Don Mitchell's "Flying Blind" is a story about an autobiographical quest to provide natural bat habitat in shagbark Hickory trees on a rural area in Vermont, and the challenges that accompanied that pursuit. The author begins with an idealistic vision in his youth that had literally driven him to escape from the superficial world of Los Angeles for the woods of Vermont. He writes about his experiences in accommodating various government agencies in order to gain funding for this pursuit to protect endangered bats, all the while earning a living as an author, professor at Middlebury College and sheep farmer. Deeper still, Mitchell exposes his inner psyche and hard-learned lessons from family life while accomplishing bat-encouraging habitat through often absurd tasks such as ridding his woods of garlic mustard, buckthorn and other invasives.
While charming and accessible, Mitchell spends a great deal of time weighed down in tedious details and engaging in a writing style steeped in run-on sentences. He complains frequently about the government agencies' requirements for public funding of his private projects. While I whole-heartedly applaud his bat conservation efforts (I am a longtime provider of bat habitat and supporter of Bat Conservational Int'l) the book seems a bit self-absorbed; frequent naive errors as a rural constituent, questionable financial judgement and endless father (and grandfather) issues distract from what should be the main topic: bats. The good news is that by the end of this tome, it appears that bats are indeed roosting in the woods, perhaps having been encouraged by all of Mitchell's hard work. For that, bats (and humans) are most certainly grateful.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A very insightful memoir; the subtitle focuses the narrative
By Trudie Barreras
In his Author's Note as introduction to this extraordinary memoir, Mitchell warns, "The facts in this account are `true,' so far as I understand the meaning of that word. But they are presented in a way that I hope will mimic a bat's peripatetic flight: bouncing from here to there, from one topic to the next without advance warning. Much of life is lived that way, looked at from a certain angle." I am grateful for this information, because it freed me from trying to develop some kind of comprehensive chronology or topical cohesiveness.
Although Don briefly describes the way in which he and his wife Cheryl came to their farm in 1972, the main time frame of the narrative is the six-year period from 2006 - 2012, when the whole idea of studying bats and providing habitat for them on the Mitchell's Vermont farm was conceived and brought to reality. In 2008, dealing with frustration about increasing property taxes on the "approximately" 150 acre farm with its pastures, woods, pond, cliff and numerous buildings, and feeling unfulfilled in his college teaching, Mitchell decided to take time off from academic endeavors and try to qualify his farm for some relief of the tax burden by participating in a "Use Value Appraisal Program" - UVA for short. One thing led to another, and the project evolved from simply trying to upgrade and better maintain the forested area (a Herculean task in itself, as it turned out) to a very elaborate government-monitored plan for developing bat habitat as a possible contribution to the fight against white-nose syndrome, which was beginning to totally devastate the population of bats in the US and Canada.
Don Mitchell emphasizes throughout the book his ongoing difficulties with bureaucratic meddling with what he considers his own volunteer efforts on his own property. In fact, his subtitle, while long, is very revealing: "One Man's Adventures Battling Buckthorn, Making Peace with Authority, and Creating a Home for Endangered Bats". The Buckthorn is a very invasive and difficult shrub which is considered to be a serious threat to local flora and which had to be removed if Mitchell was to achieve his goal of getting support for his overall plan. A considerable amount of fascinating information about bats, land-clearing and the frustrations of dealing with rather back-breaking work single-handedly in his 6th decade forms the practical framework for this memoir, but what really made the story intriguing for me was the way in which Don described his "shadow work" while engaged in this project.
This is where Mitchell focuses on his "issues" with authority, and there is a rather brilliant chapter towards the end in which develops the differences between having authority based on one's real capabilities and expertise, and behaving in and authoritarian way as a ploy to counteract one's sense of inadequacy. All of this is framed in a deeply insightful development of awareness of many of the troubling influences from his own family's background, which occurs while he is engaged in the "uber meditation" of clearing the woods.
Although at times I got a bit lost in the technicalities of the author's discussions, the overall impression was of an extremely vivid and very worthwhile endeavor. The topic is certainly timely, as the problem of bat die-off due to white-nose syndrome is becoming ever more distressing, and many of us can relate to the dilemma of excessive property taxes and other factors that are making small farms an endangered species in their own right. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Bats, trees, government, and family
By hwash
This is a book of three different stories: The story of the White-Nose Syndrome epizootic in North American bats (which is what I got it for), the story of a person in his 60s growing beyond a painful childhood, and the story of a win-win situation evolving between an independent farmer, the government, and nature.
On a very pragmatic, educational level, this gives urban readers a glimpse of the complex relationships between farmers, contractors, recreational users, and the federal and state governments. Sometimes the bureaucracy seems mindboggling but at the same time, the civil servants who interact with Mitchell come across as professionals who are genuinely interested in conservation and helping the farmer get something out of it. The reader also learns a little about forestry and chainsaws - always fun. For those wanting to learn about WNS in bats, there are certainly better resources out there, but this book contains a decent history if you don't know about it already.
Mitchell's semi-apology in the Author's Note for the "peripatetic" nature of the story seems unnecessary, as he weaves a coherent inner narrative of how memories of his childhood and youth are sparked by recent events. The stories are sharply split into "then" and "now", the author perhaps deeming that the middle part of his adulthood after a youthful brush with Hollywood to be fairly uneventful.
The "present-day" part of the story starts with the discovery of rare Indiana bats on Mitchell's property shortly before the plague of White-Nose Syndrome strikes the USA. Thinking that a little cash can't hurt since he retired from a salaried job as a lecturer at Middlebury, the author and his wife sign up for several conservation programs to take advantage of the forests on their land, but it turns out that "restoring" it to the government's requirements is a lot more complicated and hard work than they anticipated. But bound by contract and determined to get the money, he hunkers down to chopping buckthorn and pulling up garlic mustard.
At first his skepticism is over material things: Wouldn't it be more natural to let invasive species do their thing? (After, all white humans are invasive in North America too.) Is weeding his land really going to do any good considering how broadly the invasive spread already? Isn't glyphosate a bad thing? Is all this really going to help the bats? But the obsessive, masochistic persistence needed to do the work single-handedly - what he calls a "batshit" mindset - draws up memories of his father, an authoritarian and often cruel man, but one who demanded of himself as much as others. Even as Mitchell ruminates on how his adulthood has been spent in rebellion against how he was raised, he slowly recognizes the good things that his father passed down. Dredged-up recollections of an abusive older relative make him realize that his father was struggling with an even more damaging childhood that he tried to shield Mitchell and his siblings from.
Mitchell also slowly comes to terms with working for the "taxpayers" and the bats, developing an intimate knowledge of the forest that he largely left alone before. Having been raised Christian, he ruminates over the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as gardeners who are later condemned to become farmers, and turns over the meaning of authority versus authoritarianism, trying to think how much each applies to this conservation project and our responsibilities toward nature as humans in a changing world. It's not an easy subject, but one which anyone concerned about the future of the world has to think an act on.
This is a good book for anybody who likes nature and wants to learn a little about forestry and bat conservation. It's also a good book for anybody who has a complicated relationship with their parents, which is to say pretty much everyone.
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