Rat-A-Rama brings ardent rodent lovers to Boise

The sixth annual Rat-A-Rama was an event on a mission: To dispell unflattering myths about the frequently benighted creatures. 

RatsPacNW, a rat fanciers club with around 300 members across the Pacific Northwest and Canada, hosted the "fancy rat show and educational fair" at the Idaho Humane Society on Saturday. 

According to rat lovers like Lynn Rosscamp, a certified show rat judge who came all the way from Seattle for Rat-A-Rama, rats have personalities that combine the best of cats — independence — with the best of dogs — loyalty and a pack mentality. She fell in love with rats years ago, after her boyfriend adopted a retired rat from a science lab. She found him "charming," which went for the boyfriend, too. She married him, and got more rats. 

"Once you go rat, you'll never go back," Rosscamp said. 

She had a good day Saturday. Mitsu, her newly-adopted "Russian Blue Wheaton Burmese," a rat undeniably pretty as rats go, with a soft grey coat that looked like a sweater you would definitely want to wear, took the Best of Show prize in the "solid color kitten" category. Yes, rats younger than 14 weeks are known as kittens. 

The ideal time to show a rat is when it's between four and nine months old. That's a rat's "prime beauty time," Rosscamp explained. "After a year, you get that middle-aged spread." 

Michelle Carroll, a Rat-A-Rama organizer, raises rats in Boise and cares for abandoned pet rats or "rat rescues." Her favorite rat variety is the "hairless" — which looks a little like Yoda from "Star Wars" wearing a loose, pink suit. The sight of these animals, flopped in one of the rat hammocks Carroll designs and sells, could likely melt the stoniest heart of a rat-hater. The movie, "Ratatouille," featuring animated chef rats, helped the image of rats, too, Carroll said. But it also had an effect similar to the release of "101 Dalmatians" when people adopted puppies too hastily without considering the work that goes into owning a pet who is not animated. 

"We had a lot more rat rescues after that movie," Carroll said. 

For Robbi Schaecher of Tacoma, rescue worked in the other direction. 

Caring for her pet rats helped her recover from an eating disorder, she said. Being around them calmed her, and she liked coming home to find them waiting for her in their cage. In addition to Aaron, a squishy, handbag-sized rat who perched on her shoulder, and Joanna, a sleek rat who won a satin ribbon in the "marked kitten" category, Schaecher has made a lot of human friends through her interest. 

She drove  to Boise with fellow rat enthusiasts, a score of competition rats and several rescued rats available for adoption. 

The night before the big show, she and the others formed an assembly line at Michelle Carroll's house. One person washed the rats in the sink with baby shampoo, another person dried them, and someone else clipped their toenails. 

From the looks of the scratches on her neck and shoulders, Schaecher appeared to have gotten toenail duty quite a few times. 

"They're my battle scars," she said. 

One dam, one day

The Swan Falls Dam complex sits at the bottom of a rocky basalt canyon that zig-zags through the desert south of Kuna.
Oh, and Kuna, for those of you who do not know Idaho, sits in the desert south of Boise.
This should tell you a lot about the geography in our part of the world.
After the attacks on 9-11, federal officials decided Swan Falls Dam — the first hydroelectric dam on the Snake River, built at the turn of the last century — was vulnerable as a terrorism target. So, while the modern part of the complex is still churning out power, officials closed the dam's hundred-year-old powerhouse and, most unfortunately, the small hydroelectric museum inside.
At least they open the museum one day a year and let the public in. Saturday is that day. I wrote a story for The Statesman about it, and spent the morning touring the site with the Idaho Power spokesman.

Here are some reasons why I think it's worthwhile to go to Swan Falls:

1. The approach to the edge of the canyon, and the first look down at the dam straddling the brown river below is worth the drive all by itself. The Idaho Power guy told me a man tried to commit suicide by driving over the edge. He didn't know a ledge below would stop his fall, and strand him. Dam workers heard the guy howling to be rescued. 

 
2. The Trade Dollar Mining and Milling Company built the dam in 1901 to supply power for the mines the company built in nearby Silver City. Horses and oxen hauled all the building material for the dam from the railroad line in Kuna, to the bottom of the canyon. The canyon walls are so steep, this seems impossible, but it actually happened.

 
3. The landscape of dark basalt cliffs, giant boulders and rocky spires on the far edge of the canyon are remarkable against a daytime sky. This morning the sky was grey-blue. The sun was out with a bit of a warm wind coming up off the water. 

4. The dam and its reservoir lie within the Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area. You might see falcons, hawks, owls. You will definitely see swallows. These are among my favorite birds. They’re small. They dart. Their body is a sleek, shiny indigo with a rust-colored belly. I can't see them without thinking of Persian carpets.  

5. Inside the powerhouse, a bright, quiet, industrial space, you can look out casement windows and see up-river and down-river at the same time.  

6. The powerhouse is made of molded concrete, like parts of the Idaho State Capitol in Boise. In both places, you can still see the marks of the wood plank molds.

7. You will never again see so many amusing vintage ads for electric power in one place. An especially notable ad pictures a farmer and a farmwife, “Handy Andy” and “Handy Annie.” Each is drawn having more arms than Shiva. The arms represent the ways electricity can help a person by lightening their load — from curling hair, to grinding meat, to massaging scalps to cooking waffles and grooming animals.
Another ad urges one to “Be a shadow-chaser” by stocking up on light bulbs.

The most adorable ad may be one featuring the "Electrikats," a family of black cats who wear human clothing and appear to have electrified tails. In the ad, a human couple is struggling to cook food on their wood stove. Mrs. Electrikat, who has used an electric stove instead, is already serving dinner to her waiting, forks in hand, family.

  
8. The old equipment inside the powerhouse, from the steel cranes and giant hooks overhead that moved heavy equipment around the plant, to the turbine shaft that resembles a giant egg-beater, to the “wicket” gates that controlled the amount of water coming into the turbines, is all 100 years old. But it is so solid and so obviously well made, it looks like you could switch it all back on right this minute and power a city. And then, for fun, bring a Frankenstein monster to life.

9. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let me inside the powerhouse’s control room, or "nerve center," as I like to say. But imagine this. The control panel inside is made of solid granite. The end result may be elegance. But the reason was safety. Granite wouldn’t conduct an electric charge that might have shocked the controller.

10. The modern part of the dam, which actually won't be open for touring, is the manliest place I've been for a long time, maybe ever. Hard hats and blue denim work coveralls hang on hooks on the wall. The sole bathroom has a urinal and a big pile of magazines. They aren't girlie magazines like I was expecting, but Mopar, Muscle Car, magazines instead. A couple bars of Lava Soap rested on the counter. 

The place broke with manliness in one way. The dam gets turbines from Austria. The Austrians like to name the turbines after sexy women from a certain pin-up calendar. The Swan Falls men put the kibosh on Ursula and Liesel and renamed the turbines after little girls who have gone missing from small Idaho towns and met a bad end. 

Trees, suffering and enemies

I used to believe that the world was a balanced and just place. That if I were pained about something, but did my time and paid the pain tab, then something good would happen to me in the same measure to balance out the bad thing. I believed I would get a consolation prize that was just as good as whatever I had lost. My belief that the world worked like that probably came from the transformation stories that were everywhere when I was a kid: the awkward girls who turned into heart-throbs; the underdog wearers of ratty gym clothes who became tennis champions.
My personality and body — melancholy optimism edged with Pollyanna in an unusually tall girl — made me vulnerable to these stories and I believed them. Or, I did, until one of my friends, a poet well read in a dangerous way, shared this line with me from Dostoevsky.
"There is only one thing that I dread," the Russian said, "not to be worthy of my sufferings."
Somehow, until that moment, I had managed to ignore the possibility that I could have a dark time and it would never swing over into light, that I could have trouble or disappointment that would never pay off in a tennis trophy or an engagement ring or some equivalent prize.
Having this realization might sound like the normal learning curve one takes into adulthood, had it not happened this year, when I am 43. Maybe I was lucky to be able to suspend the truth about the world's lack of balance for as long as I did, but the landing into reality felt like a hard one when it finally happened.
Fortunately, a piece of literature from a very different time reminded me of another way to look at pain and pain's pay-offs — the novel "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," a staple on fifth-grade reading lists everywhere.
I had wanted to re-read this book, because even though a lot of time had passed since I read it when I was a fifth-grader myself, an image from the book had always stayed with me. It was blood, coughed up onto a down pillow by a young man dying of consumption. The family in the story was poor so they didn't throw the bloody pillow in the garbage after the man died. They covered it with new cloth and gave it away as a present. The recipient of the gift never knew about the blood, dried and secret under the soft, white cotton.
I wanted to know if that image were actually as unsettling as I remembered it. Because some images, capable of making you feel as though your gut is tickling up into your lungs the first time you encounter them, have no staying power. I speak, for example, of James Cagney's trussed-up dead body, delivered to his mother's apartment in the 1931 film "The Public Enemy." He tumbles, eyes wide-open, towards the camera and it's horrifying. But the second time you see the movie, dead Jimmy's tumble is a little less shocking. By the third time it's just Hollywood corny.
The consumption pillow, for what it's worth, has staying power. The image is every bit as gruesome as I remembered it.
But what resonated with me as much in my re-read of the book, were passages about Brooklyn kids with head lice.
The children without lice would taunt the children with lice. When the children with lice got kerosened free of the pests, those very children would join the group of lice-free taunters. Their experience, wrote author Betty Smith, humiliating as it was, taught them no empathy.
It's different now, in this relatively easy world that's not so hard-scrabble as turn-of-the-century New York, with all its vermin and coughed-up lung blood, Triangle Shirtwaist fires and airless tenements. "Sufferings" do teach empathy. Maybe Dostoevsky would have considered the acquisition of a sympathetic heart an adequate pay off.

Things that are possible with flowers

The thaw is here and things are growing. On a lark, I wrote up an alphabetical list of all the perennial flowers that will grow happily in Idaho without much care or water. I included as many natives as I could think of and the list is a riot of common and botanical names. Some flowers, like the chocolate flower, officially "berlanderia," straddle the alphabetical B-C border.
The chocolate flower is a genuinely freakish thing. Smallish yellow daisies on kind of grey foliage that you wouldn't think much of. Until you smell them. No kidding, it's like breathing in a cup of cocoa.
Then, of course, the baptista is a straddler too, that could fall under "B" but also under "F" or maybe "I" as false indigo.
I filled in all the letters, except for Q and X.
If desperate I can go with quince for Q. It's a tree, of course. But not a tree without a personal significance for me.
A quince tree grows on the edge of my parents property. It's not a beautiful tree and its fruit, in their pesticide-free yard, is measly and pocked. But the smell of the yellow fruit is sweet and clean, and a smell you might choose, were you called upon, for some reason, to designate a representative smell for the year 1932. (The color for that year, by the way, would be fly-paper yellow).
When my grandmother was alive, she made jelly out of the quinces from this tree. The jelly had a delicate flavor and was clear, pale pink. The tree is not beautiful but its jelly was. And I liked to pop the wax seal out of the top of a new jar and lick the pink off the wax.
It may be impossible to find an X plant and I may have to cheat, resort to finding a flower with an X-shaped center, or something like that.
I've thought that maybe I should plant an alphabetical garden, all labeled and fastidious. The idea came after I spotted a perfect "a" plant -- acanthus.
We have acanthus at the greenhouse where I work on Mondays (the one day a week I am not a newspaper reporter).
Apparently it can grow very big and showy. Acanthus does always look that way on Corinthian columns. But it straddles an alphabetical line, too. Its fancy name, acanthus, gives way to comedy in its common name: bear breeches.
Breeches are pants, right? Bear pants? That's comedy.
Another garden project I would like to do is to collect a list of all the ways one can transform certain blossoms into certain other things.
So far, I know of three:
— snapdragon: well, the blossom does look like a dragon head, and you can pinch it and make the "jaw" move.
— hollyhock (alcea, for science): you can pick a blossom, and turn it over so it's like a little skirt. Then, poke a hole in the top with a nail. Pick a blossom that hasn't bloomed yet and is still a hard, green ball. Leave a little stem to be a neck, and stick it in the skirt. Then it's a hollyhock woman.
— bleeding heart (dicentra, for science): I just learned this one at the greenhouse. Pick one of those little puffy hearts. Pull it apart gently and the pistil (?) looks like a naked lady sitting in a bathtub.
All of this is much better than that old "he loves me, he loves me not," petal plucking business, isn't it?
Besides, you always knows the answer to that question, even before you start to pluck.

Mosaic altar 1

(Photograph: Brad Talbutt)

This year I submitted four mosaic "altar pieces" for consideration in the Boise Art Museum Triennial. I made the first cut — some 250 applicants down to 70. But I did not make the second cut, which was far more cruel ... 70 down to 25. But the top 70 artists each got a live studio visit from the BAM curator, something that inspired me to paint my studio walls (rosewood pink, to play up my love of iridescent glass) and hire the very talented artist and craftsman Andrew Traub to hang my pieces as though they were in a museum.
And he did. We chose to build little frames on the backs of the panels so the pieces float a bit off the walls. Not to get too religious about it, but such an arrangement makes sense for altar pieces.
I started thinking of the mosaics as altar pieces for a couple reasons. One, the iridescent glass I use. I find it impossible to not stare at it, which inevitably puts me into a somewhat dopey state that could just as easily be meditative and not quite of this world.
The other reason was more practical. Mosaic is still living down the idea some people have that it's "craft," you know, kind of like sock monkeys. I've never seen mosaic that way ... but then, I'm also a lover and doer of illustration, which has certain reputations of its own.
I thought combining panels into larger, multi-section arrangements would give them some gravitas.
Alas, whatever gravitas I summoned wasn't enough to get me into the show. I'll try again in three years.
This particular mosaic is one I think of as a "storm" altar. I made the big spiral section while I was listening to reports of the Hurricane Katrina disaster on NPR. I couldn't stop listening. I was thinking of turbulance and waves of energy, but also the colors, sometimes lurid, of New Orleans, a city I've visited more times (3) than would really make sense for a westerner like me. Twice, with two different boyfriends. Once on my own to do, of course, mosaic, and look at cemeteries. And smell fragrant flowers the likes of which do not grow west of the Mississippi. And realize how much I love New Orleans gardens, the ones that are overgrown and hidden from the street, but are right in the middle of town, none-the-less.

The Masters of Display

Laurel calls Ghanaians the “masters of display.” Indeed. Even lumps of coal in tall gunny-sacks are lined up like little men along the road, with chunks of coal on the top of the bags, arranged like crowns. Big, rough brown yams look elegant when arranged in pyramids.
Ghanaians sell vermillion palm oil in gallon jugs. Even at the most modest road-side joints, the jugs are stacked into architectural forms.

Die Fledermaus on the Equator

Fruit bats congregate in the middle of the city and hang from the trees on a busy road in a neighborhood known as “Area 37.” They fly, even in the daylight, chirping and singing. When they light on a branch, they hang like big black teardrops. A remarkable thing to see is sunlight, shining through the thin skin of a bat’s wing.