This summer we had a bit of a mouse problem. Not a problem really, just more of a mouse presence. No, there were no mice in the house. No terrified scenes of Stephanie screaming while standing on a chair, clutching at her skirt and hollering for help. Nothing like that. These mice were all outside.

Our back yard had been allowed to grow wild for who knows how many years before we bought this house. As we started clearing all the brush from behind the house, the mice became displaced and were suddenly more visible. They liked running and burrowing right along side the house. Their presence was becoming common enough to be disconcerting, so my first step was to set a handful of traps along popular mouse runs.

I collected half a dozen mice that way. But then we got impatient. The summer was so nice, we were outside as much as possible every day, and we’d see them scurry around whenever we were outside. Our next door neighbor told us he’d simply popped ‘em with a .22 rifle when occasion called. I had a .22, and it wasn’t long before I started to reach for it whenever a mouse was around.

I shot the first one from the second floor front porch, pointed straight down to the ground below. It was a very satisfying feeling. More so than the Snap of a mouse trap around the corner. And so I began picking them off one at a time. Stephanie, always a fan of blood and guts and cruelty to small creatures, urged me on with what can only be called an undercurrent of bloodlust. She called for me whenever a mouse appeared around the house.

The boys also watched this and encouraged me from the elevated perch of our back deck. “Are you gonna shoot a mouse with your gun?” they’d ask. “Getcher gun! Daddy, getcher gun!” Toby would shout.

One afternoon when Mel and Teddy were here visiting from Texas, I shot a mouse at the corner of our house. The boys were running around playing and stopped to watch this with a lot of interest and curiosity. Once the mouse had been dispatched, I let the boys examine the mouse a little more closely. They were very interested, looked with fascination, and asked plenty of questions, but then moved on.

I have to stop here to explain and assure. Though we do have guns for reasons of recreation, hunting and defense, we also recognize the sacred responsibility that comes with gun ownership: the responsibility to keep all firearms secured against unauthorized users. And they are. What guns we have are stored unloaded and trigger locked. Anything less is criminal.

Not only this, but we have made the decision not to allow our boys to have or play with anything like a toy gun. Though I played with toy guns when I was a boy, and though we have friends who are good parents and allow this for their kids, we haven’t wanted to send the message that guns are toys, that they are to be played with, and most importantly that they can not be pointed at other people, ever.

Anyway, now Toby has this wooden puzzle piece that does not resemble a gun in any way. But somehow his imagination transformed it into one. We haven’t known exactly how to handle this. At first we told him it wasn’t one and put it away, but he has persisted. We have vacillated between ignoring it and redirecting him to other subjects. To his credit, the one time he pointed it at Stephanie, we stopped and had a talk about not ever pointing it at people. He said Sorry, Mommy, and has been very careful about pointing it (his wooden puzzle piece) in a safe direction since. So at least that’s something.

At this point, Stephanie and I just kind of marvel at him and exchange horrified glances whenever he talks about it. But still, he talks about it more than we’d expect. He talks often about the “mouses” and about how I should shoot them. At least once every few days. All these months later. When we see a bear on the TV or in a book, he tells me I should shoot it. It’s both amusing and disturbing.

Jacob doesn’t do this. For some reason the subject just doesn’t hasn’t made the same impression on him. But it has certainly made an impression on Toby. I’ve wondered if ignoring the subject would limit his fixation, and if perhaps taking him out and letting him watch me shoot would perhaps quell his fascination. I don’t want to raise the fascination to a whole new level.

Here is a picture from this fall of a flock of cranes getting ready to head south. They came to my attention because of their cacophonous trumpeting. I spent some time today griding it out and counting the birds. Turns out there are well over 600 birds in this one image. 

One of the strong selling points of our current house was the presence of a mother-in-law apartment downstairs and its occupant: a single, quiet young woman who was rarely home, but who paid rent monthly. 

We’ve always had it in our minds that we would like to have investment properties generating some income someday, and this was a good place to start. Honestly, we couldn’t make the monthly obligations on our current house without this rental income.

But having a renter down stairs was not without a downside. First, because she was in her space before we moved in, we always had the feeling that we were on her turf, even though it was our house. And second, I was always overly conscious of the amount of noise our two boys made, thumping, bumping, banging and dropping large toys on the floor, and how that noise transferred down stairs.

We tried so hard to get them to be quiet and to be cognizant of our down stairs neighbor. But they are little kids, and they couldn’t always help it. I was often stressed and irritable after a Saturday morning of shushing them, and we can only shush them so much before we start crushing their little spirits. Then there were the times that she blasted the music, just to let us know how frustrated she was. And we can understand that. Nonetheless, we were also a little glad when she moved on.

We interviewed a few new applicants for the apartment. I was looking for another single, quiet individual, but Stephanie came across a young couple and immediately had a good feeling about them. And the seemed nice enough. We were glad to have them.

And I know I can be overly particular. I often like things just so. My first issue was with having a couple rather than an individual. Two people use twice as much water. They flush the toilet twice as often. The open a close doors twice as much. It’s twice as much wear on everything for the same rent.

And two people have two cars. Stephanie and I have each have a car, and our renter had a car, so that was three in our driveway when we first moved in. Now Jamiee has a car, and our renting couple has two cars. That’s five cars in our driveway. It looks like a parking lot. Especially when our renters have a friend, with a car, come visit.

During their first interview, we told them very openly about our kids and the noise they make. We wanted them to know we were sensitive to the issue, that we’d do everything we could to keep the bumping to a minimum, but that kids are kids. At least they went to bed early. The renters assured us this wasn’t a problem, and we felt better knowing they had been warned.

About a month after they moved in, our new tenants bought a new flat screen TV and accompanying sound system. Of course when you get a new toy like that, you have to let it stretch its legs and see what it’ll do. And so we experienced some full volume, deep bass sessions, but we politely ignored it. I understand that. I remember when I had my first apartment and bought my new stereo. I had more than one neighbor knock on the door and request I cool it.

Lately though, the thing that is getting us the incessant video games. We don’t know for sure, but it sounds like they alternate between Guitar Hero and some machine gunning, beach storming, canon firing, thunder rolling war game. The deep bass rumbles right up in to our living room and bedroom. The other night I was in Jacob’s bed in the far corner of the house and could still hear it. At two in the morning.

Believe me, I would have no problem asking them to pipe down. It is my house, and I don’t mind a little civil confrontation. But I also know how much noise our children make. At seven in the morning. Seven days a week. And I just can’t bring myself to be so hypocritical as to tell them to knock it off.

But something may need to be done. They had a friend over yesterday when I got home from work. He was there all evening as the guns of thunder rolled on. It was going when we went to sleep at midnight. It was going when Toby went to the bathroom at 2AM. It was going when I woke from a bad dream at 530AM. It was going at 6AM while I drank my coffee. It finally quieted when the friend left about 8AM.  

What to do? 

The other day, I was perusing the status updates of my fellow FaceBookers, when I came across a brief and inelegant status that scoffed at the idea of global warming. This misguided and inarticulate acquaintance (who shall remain nameless) might be excused for her ignorance (or perhaps it really is inexcusable), but she reminds me of a surprisingly large number of other people we know (I can name half a dozen off the top of my head) as well as voices in the national media and the internet who similarly scoff at the idea that the planet is warming.

When I first began to hear about global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer (two completely separate and unrelated issues, by the way), it sounded too much like alarmist worst-case-scenario thinking. It did not seem likely or possible that the entire planet could be warming. This was in the early nineties, and the idea was still too strange, and the issue was not yet ripe enough for our culture as a whole to acknowledge it.

I’ve always had this pet theory that very little of what I supposedly know can be really known for certain. Was there a George Washington? I know because I’ve been told about him by others and by what I’ve read. How can I really know? Now, that doesn’t mean I think there’s some kind of global conspiracy trying to make us all believe in George Washington. But really, how could I know? But I digress.

My point is, how can I really know that global warming is or is not happening? At this point, I think I can rely on reporting from a large diversity of expert sources, and I can rely on my personal observations, and the observations of those I know and trust.

This phenomenon is being studied by many, many agencies and individuals around the world. Some are government sponsored, but others are private, independent agencies such as US Fish and Wildlife, US Geological Survey, NOAA, our good friends here at UAF, other universities around the work, the IPCC, etc. The diversity of sources and the consensus of opinion is pretty convincing.

The old timers here in Alaska tell us that it doesn’t get as cold in the winters as it did fifty years ago. Records reflect fewer days each year of temps of 60 below. There are still spikes, warm and cold, but the general trend is less cold. The trees are growing larger, farther north. I can see this in pictures of Fort Yukon. Sixty and seventy years ago, the spruce tees were short, spindly things there in FYU. Now, they grow much taller and they continue further north. The sea ice is retreating, and the people who live on the northern coast report more difficulty each year hunting, launching boats, etc. Animals drown while swimming the longer distances from the retreating sea ice to land. Most of the glaciers in Alaska are retreating dramatically as documented by photos over the last fifty years. Permafrost is melting on the tundra, causing the many small tundra ponds that rest on top of the permafrost to drain and disappear. Rising sea levels are leading to advanced coastal erosion, displacing whole communities. The list goes on.

I take all of this as evidence, measurable and observable evidence, and conclude that the global climate is indeed changing for the warmer. It makes me crazy that there are those out there that can still think global warming is some kind of lefty myth. A government conspiracy. A person shouldn’t hang on to ideology so tightly that it blinds him to the obvious.

Now then, though climate change is happening, I don’t know that I could state with the same certainty why climate change is happening, or what will happen next. Is it caused by human activity? That is the leading theory, and it makes sense to me. The burning of fossil fuels emits carbon and other “greenhouse” gases that trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere. Could be. I suppose it is also possible that the earth is following a larger cycle of warming and cooling, and we are experiencing a thousand year warming trend from the last ice age. No one knows.

Whatever the cause, or whatever the final outcome, I just wish everyone would be open minded enough to accept what an overabundance of evidence tells us is actually happening. On what evidence do you base your skepticism? Don’t be a knucklehead.