Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (16 page)

4.
Brevard, North Carolina, is yet another “Home of the White Squirrel.” This town boasts a White Squirrel Research Institute, an annual White Squirrel Festival (complete with a Squirrel Box go-cart race), and the White Squirrel Shoppe in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which sells white squirrel earring, spinners, Christmas cards, ornaments, and videos.

5.
Exeter, Ontario, Canada, has the white squirrel population that is farthest north. To honor their squirrely population, Exeter residents created a mascot named White Wonder, and they celebrate the annual White Squirrel Festival, which they promote through a song and music video. (We urge you to look these up on YouTube.)

Billboards, municipal logos, festivals, and all kinds of knickknacks help white-squirrel towns fight their good fights on behalf of their pale-furred creatures. Residents also go out into the field to keep an eye on the populations themselves. Olney, which once had 800 white squirrels, conducts an annual squirrel
count. If the number drops below 100, the town takes preventive measures, which include careful monitoring of the most dreaded squirrel foes—domestic cats. (During the 2002 counting, which was also part of the town’s 100-Year White Squirrel Celebration, visitors were invited to participate in the count, the dedication of a white squirrel monument, and a blessing of the squirrels ceremony.)

Marionville also conducts an annual count, although many residents believe that the official counts—from 100 to 120 in most years—are usually low because some locals, like Bob Smart, nurture small populations on their own property. Smart, who estimates that he has from 50 to 75 squirrels and buys “about a ton” of feed for them each year, brings mature squirrels to town when he gets too many, since they are protected there.

The oddest tribute to white squirrels has to be Sam Sanfillipo’s dead white squirrel dioramas in Madison, Wisconsin. Sanfillipo (a retired mortician) has friends in Marionville who, on discovering his hobby of making taxidermy dioramas, sent him some dead white squirrels: “the ones that had been hit by cars or died of heart attacks or whatever.” Some of Sam’s handiwork includes six white squirrels riding motorcycles, six white squirrels on racehorses, and even a few playing basketball. (At least the beloved white squirrels aren’t in the Topless Girlie Show—yet. That diorama uses common brown squirrels wearing little grass skirts.)

There aren’t any white squirrels in Council Bluffs, Iowa; Marysville, Kansas; Kent, Ohio; and London, Ontario, Canada, but that doesn’t bother these towns one bit because they are proud boasters of black squirrels. Black squirrels are mutations of gray squirrels, and some people think that global warming is responsible for the change in pigmentation.

Council Bluffs has had black squirrels since the 1840s, but Marysville has an official town “Black Squirrel Song.” And it was the Marysville squirrels that “seeded” a population in Hobbs, New Mexico. (Unfortunately, the red fox squirrels there—imported from Sadler, Texas—killed the newcomers.)

Black squirrels at Kent State University in Ohio have inspired the annual Black Squirrel Festival and the campus’s Black Squirrel
run, but alas . . . the rodents aren’t natives. The Kent State black squirrels were imported from London, Ontario, in the 1960s. Black and white squirrels represent only a small percentage of the world’s 300-plus squirrel species, but they certainly have left their paw prints on these North American towns.

Organic Funerals

In
The American Way of Death
, a 1963 exposé of the funeral industry, Jessica Mitford argued that too many of our funeral processes and rituals are artificial, cold, and wasteful. Mitford would likely approve of a recent trend in the United States—the “green burial.” First it was recycling glass bottles and aluminum cans; now it’s recycling Grandma Beatrice and Aunt Cora. Natural funerals (green burials and clean cremations) involve thinking carefully and conscientiously about what we take from—and put back into—the earth.

For centuries, the only burial possible was a natural one. When people died, they might be burned, buried in a simple shroud, or laid to rest in a plain wooden box. Many cultures attempted to preserve bodies in accordance with spiritual beliefs. Chinese royal tombs were filled with life-sized clay models of loyal retainers and soldiers. The Egyptians embalmed their dead because of their belief that a body needed to arrive intact in the underworld. While their methods were effective (we’ve got the mummies to prove it), they weren’t particularly harmful to the Earth, just space consuming. Modern Western funeral preparations, on the other hand, involve lots of different artificial and toxic substances, from formaldehyde embalming fluid to lead-lined caskets.

In most states, embalming is optional. Without synthetic liquids
in it, the human body decomposes more quickly and cleanly. But an organic funeral does not necessarily mean you simply dig a pit and dump a body in. Many beautiful natural coffins and containers are available, from plain formaldehyde-free wooden jointed caskets to “ecopods” made of hardened recycled paper to woven reed baskets. Pressed fiber, paper, and recovered hardwood cremation urns are also available.

Green funeral advocates recommend burial over cremation; ashes are alkaline and can’t be as easily decomposed as a body. But there is a “green” way to perform cremation. Having it completed “cleanly” means that a cremation machine reclaims energy and recycles it, filters mercury, cleans bodies completely first (no synthetic materials are burned), and has less-frequent startups so that it uses less energy.

However, all these natural preparations would be spoiled if the containers went into highly processed, artificially fertilized ground, the kind that most American cemeteries currently use. Organic burial is best done in woodland burial grounds (there are many like these in Europe) that reclaim soil, build habitat, provide oxygen, sequester carbon, store water, and create urban green space.

The simplest option of all is being tried in Scandinavia: flash-freezing of a body in liquid nitrogen, then breaking it down into a fine powder that can be spread directly on the earth as compost. That’s “dust to dust” for you.

If organic burial or cremation still leaves you feeling lonely, consider a new, unique, and permanent option: have your loved one’s carbon processed into a LifeGem diamond. Created by a “special process,” these gems are supposedly identical to diamonds in every respect, and can be shaped, colored, and set to personal tastes.

But don’t be put off by the LifeGem. It’s not made from leftover ashes, but rather from the carbon in your loved one’s locks of hair.

Wiscasset, Maine

Located on Maine’s southern coast between Penobscot Bay and Portland, Wiscasset’s motto is “Maine’s Prettiest Village.” If you head into town on a sunny morning, you’ll agree: its early prosperity left a heritage of fine Federal architecture and well-planned streets.

So how did Wiscasset add “wormiest town” to its reputation? By Yankee ingenuity, of course. In the 1920s and ’30s, the town’s shipbuilding industry had fallen off, and most of Wiscasset’s narrow-gauge railway tracks and cars were converted to scrap metal. What remained had been there for centuries: coastal flats bursting with sandworms and bloodworms. In the early 20th century, they numbered in the billions, and as
Time
magazine noted, most Maine fisherfolk considered them a “damnuisance,” because bloodworms sting and sandworms pinch—quite painfully.

But the “damnuisance” started to look mighty fine when someone realized that worms, properly packed and shipped (100 worms per bag, plus “five for breakage,” packed between layers of seaweed), could be marketed to sport fishermen. True, worms aren’t as glamorous as lobsters or blueberries, but in 2003, baitworms accounted for $7.9 million worth of Maine’s marine harvest, making them its fourth most-valuable fishery crop—ahead of cod, crab, scallops, and sea urchins.

Once upon a time, Wiscasset shipped 2.5 million saltwater
worms per month to fishermen far and wide. Citizens of this southern Maine coastal town could lay claim to living in “The Worm Capital of the World,” and did so proudly.

Diggers, who pay $43 for an annual license, are independent contractors who buy their own equipment, including specially made hip waders with tight ankles that can’t be pulled off in sucking mudflats. Worm digging is backbreaking work, with 1,000 state-licensed diggers spending up to six hours at a time at low tide in knee-high mud scratching through the mud with wooden-handled, nine-inch-tinned hoes to find the worms. State regulations restrict the tools used for the harvest to “devices or instruments operated solely by hand power” in order to protect the worm flats. When the temperatures are high, the worms make things tougher by burrowing deeper to stay cool.

It’s a short season, peaking in July and August, so many pick blueberries, make Christmas wreaths, split wood, or process lobster in other seasons. Some families have been working in the baitworm business for over 50 years, but are concerned about the future. Other communities up the coast have gained on Wiscasset’s worm output, but the potential loss of their livelihood altogether is more worrisome to Wiscassians than who’s number one.

Worm populations have been steadily and rapidly declining. A 1991 biologist’s review of the baitworm fishery found that bloodworm landings—the amount of worms harvested in a particular area—were at a maximum between 1960 and 1976, ranging between 140,000 and 215,000 pounds annually. A sharp decline began in the late 1970s with landings ranging between 102,000 pounds in 1988 and 168,000 pounds in 1982.

One scientist said that in eastern Maine, things are even worse: about 20 years ago, you could harvest 2,000 worms per tide, which have dwindled to between 250 and 500 per tide. Explanations for the decline range from the natural cycles of tidal ecology, to overharvesting, to poor fishing practices like mussel dragging, in which heavy iron baskets are pulled across mudflats to harvest mussels, damaging worm habitats in the process.

Another problem facing Wiscasset and surrounding worm towns is that most state research funding goes into better-known and more lucrative species like lobster and cod, while ignoring the worms, as well as the socioeconomic impacts of their scarcity.

One solution being tried is a worm farm, the effort of a British entrepreneur named Peter Cowin who got the idea while working on his doctorate in worm biology. Cowin’s company, Seabait, is fully operational in the United Kingdom, and with a loan from the State of Maine, he’s launched a facility there.

But while the state sees aquaculture as an industry of the future that could enhance its economy and create jobs, many of the worm diggers of coastal Maine believe it is a threat to their livelihood and way of life. Of course, without worms, there won’t be any way of life to protect, so many Mainers believe Seabait technology should be used to re-seed wild worm beds.