Remember Hansel and Gretel's bread crumbs? I barely did, but their trick turned out to work for the skunk. I laid a long board down the bulkhead, guessing that most skunks were more familiar with tiptoeing along logs in the woods than climbing stairs in those same woods. I then managed to get down there without being sprayed and left a trail of bread crumbs along the floor and right up the board.
A recent article in the Bangor Daily News related a new find in the ancient world of the mighty dinosaur, a big snake. This snake, the article stated, was as long as a bus and as heavy as a VW Beetle.
I don't know how much a VW Beetle weighs, but I do know snakes have always created fear in the heart of man -- and woman. Maybe woman more than man.
This on-the-heavy-side snake ruled the dinosaur turf, making the more famous inhabitants quake on their big, scaly paws when they encountered one. I can understand that.
After all, wasn't it a serpent that steered Eve down the wrong road, down which she also led her guy, Adam?
But its skunks that scare me.
Once a friend and I were climbing a steep little mountain in Pennsylvania, once being so long ago that I was in college or thereabouts in my life's wanderings. We were young and foolish, different than my now being older and foolish. (I've lost track of my friend, so I don't know how old or foolish he now is) At the top, we decided it would be fun to toss fair-sized rocks over the side.
Looking back I'm not sure why we thought it would be fun. Maybe I'm actually not quite as foolish as I then was.
We picked up a flat rock, about a foot in diameter, and as we did we noticed a young rattlesnake curled where the rock had been. Foolish or otherwise, we moved fast. We dropped the rock back onto where the snake was.
Were we scared of that poisonous snake? You bet. But that was the last we saw of it.
I've stared a few giant garter snakes in the eye, and their foot-long, nonpoisonous body with its inch-long teeth didn't scare me a bit. A friend once even picked one up once, and it showed its appreciation for the ride by biting my friend's finger and hanging on awhile. My friend just held it up to show me.
Impressive. I'd guess I'd be a little afraid of a snake's biting my finger, even a small snake.
But it's the skunks that have ruled -- such as the ones who decided to live under our back porch. They were cute little buggers, but they ruled our home for awhile until they opted to change their habitat to the neighboring woods.
It was my fault, in a manner of speaking, that they took up lodging under the porch. It was nice that this happened in summer, so our front porch was not buried under two feet of snow and free for me to use when the little woods kittens wouldn't let me onto the back porch.
Their mother had been raiding our garden every night. Honest, when I did what I did in defense of our right to eat a bit from our own garden I had no idea "it" was a mother of the happy group, who as a result of my actions romped around our dooryard and nested under the porch.
Had I known, this story would never have been written.
In the chest-thumping he-man style of the day, I took out my shotgun when I spotted her one day in that garden and did her in with one shot. Well, actually, she wasn't quite done in at the moment. She chose to make her way across our dooryard and into our only neighbors' garage to die. After she did, I carefully removed her body and buried it in the woods.
The neighbors likely would have liked to have done me in and buried me in the woods, but that would not have been polite, neighborly etiquette. They didn't say much, which perhaps could be explained by the difficulty of talking clearly while wearing a clothespin on one's nose.
So the story is being written.
Mama Skunk's kids were not long in letting us know they now needed a parent or two -- along with four kids who would fall in love with them and make sure they got fed.
The kids did the feeding, the baby skunks did the nesting under the porch, and I got to keep trying to kick myself in the backside. The baby skunks helped with that -- at least in the idea of it -- the evening I arrived home from wherever and found the black and white youngsters were on the porch and had no intentions of allowing me onto the porch with them.
After all, I was the bad guy of the crowd.
I went in the front door.
Shortly afterward, the black and whites moved to the woods. Had they not, I may have. I'm not sure.
I've never shot a skunk since.
While we lived in that lakeside house in Swanville, I developed the habit of leaving the bulkhead open to air out the basement. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but somehow a skunk managed to tumble down the bulkhead steps and didn't quite no how to climb them.
So I had a problem. Remember Hansel and Gretel's bread crumbs? I barely did, but their trick turned out to work for the skunk. I laid a long board down the bulkhead, guessing that most skunks were more familiar with tiptoeing along logs in the woods than climbing stairs in those same woods. I then managed to get down there without being sprayed and left a trail of bread crumbs along the floor and right up the board.
Then I got the heck out of there.
Sure enough, within several hours the little woods pussy had made her way to freedom while coping with a belly full of bread crumbs. These were white bread crumbs, not the healthful organic, whole-grainy bread crumbs they would have been had that happened last summer. The skunk probably survived the white bread. We did.
We have since learned that organic veggies don't really cost all that much more -- especially if you grow them in your own garden -- and do taste much better. It's great eating potatoes that taste like potatoes and tomatoes (no matter how you pronounce them) that taste like tomatoes.
When we first came to Maine, we stayed with friends in Wiscasset, who also aired out their basement from time to time. You know what happened, because it's part of this skunky tale. We first learned of it early in the morning -- early for us, as we hadn't yet developed the rural Maine habit of rising early enough to help the sun crawl over the horizon.
When we awoke, our first words were, "Yuck, what is that?"
We already knew, and when we quickly dressed and made our way downstairs we learned that the dominant male species of our host family had discovered the black and white in the basement. Like my later experience, he took his shotgun out and dispatched the black and white when it had left the basement and was in the back yard. It hurried back into the basement to die.
Luckily for us, there were tourists in the area, my parents, who were staying in a nearby motel. We dropped in to see them well before they were ready for company and spent the entire day with them.
We returned to our hosts' home that evening and slept more or less comfortably.
Sometimes skunks can do good deeds, although that may not have been the thought of the day for one that was wandering the woods hoping to nail some good old grubs or mice for dinner. The good deed was to lead the way toward my freedom from a non-lady that lasted until I met Dolores, who married me several years later.
This non-lady (as I learned the hard way to consider her) and I were out for a walk in Birdsacre, a wooded bird sanctuary in Ellsworth. Our paths were at the time headed for Robert Frost's description of the way less taken -- or taken differently from each other -- and this walk through the woods helped.
I was more used to the woods than was my non-lady friend, which helped. As we walked, we encountered a skunk standing in the path about 30 feet in front of us.
Oh well, another skunk. This too shall pass -- without a big stink, I thought.
My non-lady friend wasn't so sure.
She asked, "What are we going to do?"
"I don't know what you're going to do," I replied, "but I'm going to continue my walk."
I did, by simply walking off the path in a half circle around the black and white, which didn't even threaten me.
Not long afterward, my non-lady friend and I took separate paths permanently.
"And that has made all the difference," as the poet wrote of his own two paths dividing in the woods not far ahead of where he too was walking.
I hope her path has been as happy as has been mine.
Milt. Gross
Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at
"Think of the story of Jesus walking on the water, found in Matthew 14:22-33 and Mark 6:45-52," Strobel writes, quoting a scholar he was interviewing. "Most English translations hide the Greek by quoting Jesus as saying, 'Fear not, it is I.' Actually, the Greek literally says, 'Fear not, I am.' Those last two words are identical to what Jesus said in John 8:58, when he took upon himself the divine name 'I AM,' which is the way God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3:14. So Jesus is revealing himself as the one who has the same divine power over nature as Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament."
A man way up in Danforth, actually who was known in those long-ago days when you could describe him such as the town drunk, said to me while we were in the general store, "I touched a moose and nobody believes me." He explained that he had canoed down the river, landed on a small island, and seen a moose standing still, just standing there. The man had walked up to the moose and touched its nose. It still stood there.I knew that in those days there was a nerve disease circulating through moose herds, which rendered them fairly helpless. They would just stand still, even if you didn't touch their noses.
Before leaving the dock, the Elizabeth Ann's captain, held up a lifejacket for us to see and even strapped it around himself. He explained that should we tip over -- maybe diesel-powered vessels don't tip over like our canoe doesn't because we're careful and cowardly about being in Maine's cold, cold water -- those life jackets would save our lives. I wondered why you just wouldn't hold onto the vessel as we would our canoe in the event it ever tipped over. Probably some Coast Guard rule.
The approximately 150 miles of trails are as varied and scenic as ever, and the Island Explorer buses allow circle hikes. Up one trail and down another. Not yet succumbing to GPS except to find corridor-boundary markers and recording their GPS settings along the Appalachian Trail (150 miles north of Acadia) as a Maine Appalachian Trail Club volunteer, I recommend a map that shows Acadia National Park's trails. The long southern part of Cadillac mountain, which the 3.5-mile South Ridge Trail follows from Route 3 to the summit.
So I poked though our little library and came up with the perfect book about green, Adventures in Contentment, by David Grayson. A fellow employee gave me this book back in the year 2,000. I remember the year only because we were working on the U.S. census together, that is, until I realized how ridiculous it was to be starting the census in rural, woodsy, lakeside Maine in mud season.
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The Download book does not contain a section on Seder Olam
Definition: King's Calendar Chronological Research
The Premise: Between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE (but continuing down to at least 104 BCE), Sectarian redactors transcribed the legitimate 'solar year' chronological records of Israel and Judah, into an artificial form, with listed years as each comprised of 12 months of 4 weeks of 7 days, or 336 days per year, thus creating a 13th artificial year where 12 solar years existed.
When the Synchronous Chronological Data provided in the Books of Kings and Chronicles for the Divided Kingdom Period are measured in years of 336 days, the synchronisms actually align. [Refer to Appendix 5. to see how it synchronises the Divided Kingdom Period]
About the KingsCalendar Publisher
R.P.BenDedek is the owner and Editor of KingsCalendar.com which was originally set up to publicize his research results into the Chronology of Ancient Israel. Those results were published under the title: 'The King's Calendar: The Secret of Qumran'.
Whilst there have been many attempts to solve the chronological riddle of the Bible's synchronisms of reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah and their synchronism with other Ancient Near Eastern Nations, no other research is based on a simple mathematical formula which could, if it is incorrect, be disproved easily. To date, no one has been able to dismiss the mathematical results of this research.
Free to air Academic articles set forth Apologetics for and results of his discovery of an "artificial chronological scheme" running through the Bible, Josephus, the Damascus Documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Seder Olam Rabbah.
During the current economic downturn, this book has been drastically reduced in price but will eventually rise as the economy improves.
Check the Chapter Precis Page to see details of each chapter and to gain access to the Four Free to Air Chapters
R.P. BenDedek writes social commentaries and photographic 'Stories from China' both at KingsCalendar, and as a contributing columnist at Magic City Morning Star News in Maine USA.
(He has been teaching Conversational English in China since 2003 and currently (2013) is teaching in Suzhou City Jiangsu Province.)
